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-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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

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

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]]> [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. 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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/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:16:35 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=886

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 2, 2011.] Hurricane news' innovation and hype: The big U.S. news story this week was Hurricane Irene, which hit the East Coast and New England last weekend. It was a story that hit particularly close to home for many of the U.S.' leading news organizations, which led to some innovative journalism, but also some questionable coverage, too. Several news organizations temporarily took down their online paywalls during the storm, led by the New York Times and the Long Island newspaper Newsday. The Times also used the storm as an opportunity to introduce a new Twitter account devoted to curation of information on Twitter by the paper's editors. The Lab's Megan Garber noted that the account is incorporating much more conversation than the Times' other official Twitter accounts, and Jeff Sonderman of Poynter talked to the Times about its goal with the account — to provide a space for faster, more unrestrained information from the Times on Twitter. Another good example of storm-related news innovation: The Journal Register Co.'s Ben Franklin Project. Irene was also a big occasion for TV news, which trotted out the usual round-the-clock coverage and on-location weather-defying reports. After the storm passed through, many questioned whether news organizations had gone over the top in their breathless coverage of Irene. The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz accused cable news of being "utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon," and at the Boston Herald, Michael Graham called the Irene coverage "a manufactured media product with a tenuous connection to the actual news." Others (many outside the TV news industry) pushed back against those charges: Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy said that the storm's damage actually largely matched the coverage; it just seemed like it fizzled out because that damage wasn't near New York or Washington. The New York Times' Nate Silver took a more scientific approach and made a similar conclusion, showing that the amount of Irene coverage was generally in line with that of previous storms, when the level of damage was factored in. Poynter's Julie Moos, who put together a great summary of the hurricane hype debate, also argued that Irene's severity matched the level of coverage, providing along the way a useful six-part measuring stick for journalistic hype. "The perception of hype is fed by the gap between supply and demand," she said. "Journalists must make more closely calibrated decisions than ever about what information to provide." — Social network as identity service: Google CEO Eric Schmidt threw some more fuel onto the slow-burning argument over Google+ and real names when he said at a conference last weekend that the new social network is essentially an "identity service with a link structure around your friends" — a way for others on the Internet to verify your identity and communicate with you under that identity. Asked about the risks to some people of such a hard-and-fast online identity, Schmidt replied that, well, they don't have to use Google+ then. It was quite a telling quote regarding Google+'s true purpose — one that several commentators seized on. Mashable's Pete Cashmore described the battle between Google and Facebook over web identity and reasoned that the reason Google is taking a hard line on real names is that it needs its identity system to be more reliable than Facebook's. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson said now we officially know who the real-names policy is really for: Google, not us. "The answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to," he said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram used the statement to tie together his description of what's at stake in the identity competition — the more accurate and detailed identities are, the more advertisers will pay for them. Tech blogger Dave Winer was more blunt: Google+ is a bank, he said. They need people's real names because they want to move money around, like any other business. At the Guardian, tech writer Cory Doctorow argued that we need to open up this discussion about online identity, and that the single-identity philosophy Google's espousing isn't in our best interests. Meanwhile, this month's Carnival of Journalism blog ring wrote about Google+, with several writers urging journalists and academics to "just use it," as the University of Colorado's Steve Outing put it. Spot.Us' David Cohn put the rationale well: "The reason to be on Google+ isn’t because it’s the newest, hottest, sexiest thing. ... You should be on these sites to understand how people are communicating and the vocabulary of this communication." — CNN grabs Zite: Major news organizations have been itching to jump into the increasingly crowded market for tablet-based news readers, and this week CNN made its own play, snatching up Zite, the personalized, magazine-like iPad news app launched in March. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher put the purchase price between million and million and explained the simple reason for CNN's interest: They're trying to acquire the technology to keep up with audiences that are quickly moving onto mobile platforms for their news. Zite will continue to operate as a separate unit, across the country from CNN's headquarters. According to mocoNews' Tom Krazit, CNN will help Zite scale up to a bigger audience, while Zite will work to improve CNN's mobile offerings. And when asked by Mashable's Lauren Indvik about adding ads, CNN execs said they're going to build up the product first and worry about the business model later. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said Zite can help CNN learn what people are sharing, why, and how they want news presented in a mobile format. — WikiLeaks' inadvertent cable release: This week marked what looks like the beginning of a new, bizarre confusing chapter in the WikiLeaks saga. The story's been a bit of a confusing story, but I'll try to break it down for you: Ever since last November, WikiLeaks has been gradually releasing documents from its collection of diplomatic cables. But over the past couple of weeks, the full archive of 251,000 cables was inadvertently released online, without sensitive information redacted, as WikiLeaks had been doing. WikiLeaks blamed the Guardian, the British newspaper with which it had been working, for publishing the password to the hidden document files in a book about WikiLeaks earlier this year. The Guardian responded that it was told when it was given the password that it was temporary, to be changed within a day. In the meantime, as Der Spiegel explained well, Daniel Domscheit-Berg had defected from WikiLeaks with the server that contained the files, and other WikiLeaks supporters spread the files around to keep them from being taken off the web. Once the password leaked out, the contents of the files gradually started spilling online, and by Wednesday night, they were completely public, according to Der Spiegel. It's not entirely clear what WikiLeaks will do with the files now, but that's where the conflict stands. — FT pulls out of the App Store: Back in June, the Financial Times became the first major news organization to develop an HTML5 app for Apple's App Store, allowing it to design a single app for multiple platforms and to handle subscriptions outside of the app itself, which gave it a way around Apple's 30% cut. FT removed the app from the App Store this week instead of complying with Apple's requirement that all subscriptions be handled within apps. As paidContent's Robert Andrews explained, FT can still make money off of existing iPad app users, but the paper says most of its users have switched over the web app, and its web app use is growing quickly enough that this isn't a big loss anyway. As GigaOM's Darrell Etherington pointed out, this could be an important test case in whether a news organization can replace its Apple-based app business with an HTML5-based web app. — A new generation of campaign reporters: We're starting to hurtle toward full-on presidential campaign season in the U.S., and according to the New York Times, many of the reporters who'll be covering it are 20-somethings, mere babes in the dark, scary woods of campaign journalism. The Times did a trend story on these young reporters, focusing on a boot camp for them put on by CBS and National Journal. Among the advice they're getting: Be careful to slip up in public view, and don't break news on Twitter. Mocking, of course, ensued. Village Voice's Rosie Gray said CBS and National Journal are asking to get beat on big stories with their Twitter policy, and Alex Pareene of Salon said the moral of the story is that modern campaign journalism is so inane that it can be pushed off to barely experienced reporters without anyone being the wiser. The Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry had perhaps the most substantive concern: Why are these reporters being taught primarily about avoiding gaffes, rather than actually doing good journalism? — Reading roundup: Here's the rest of what happened in this crazy-busy news week: — The New York Times' public editor, Arthur Brisbane, wrote a column criticizing the Times' popular DealBook site for missing large-scale economic issues in favor of small, incremental daily stories. Times business editor Larry Ingrassia fired back with a defense of DealBook, and Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon also defended DealBook, saying Brisbane was making a false either-or distinction, among other errors. — A few more reflections and analyses of Steve Jobs' impending departure as Apple CEO, announced last week: The New York Times' David Carr on what he changed, and Wired's John C. Abell on Jobs' legacy and Tim Carmody on Jobs and the arts. — He's made the point before in different ways, but NYU j-prof Jay Rosen's analysis of why the system of political news coverage is broken is still worth a read. He also followed it up with a rethinking of what political journalism could be. — Finally, NPR's Matt Thompson wrote a great piece on what journalists can learn from the scientific method, tying together some useful big ideas.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:09:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=884

This Week in Review: Remembering Steve Jobs, and a new-old media partnership

This Week in Review: TBD gets the axe, deciphering Apple’s new rules, and empowering more news sources

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 26, 2011.] Apple begins life after Jobs: This week in the media and tech world was defined by three men's departures, all announced on Wednesday. By far the biggest was Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple, 35 years after he founded the company. The decision was largely health-driven, as Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and has been on medical leave since January. Jobs will continue to be Apple's chairman, and as the Wall Street Journal reported, he'll still be involved in product development. The announcement has drawn a massive amount of commentary, and Techmeme is the best place to gorge yourself on it — or you can read Adam Penenberg's mashup. Here's a small selection of some of the most interesting stuff, starting with the reflections on Jobs' legacy: All Things Digital's Walt Mossberg put together a sharp little rundown of the ways Jobs has changed the computing, animation, music, and mobile media industries. (TV is next.) Tech blogger John Gruber marveled at the company Jobs has built, saying, "Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself." Om Malik of GigaOM said Jobs taught us that building the future requires taking the long view, and tech guru Robert Scoble praised Jobs as a CEO who genuinely cared about his products, not just profits. If you're looking for more on Jobs himself, Byliner highlighted seven definitive profiles of the man from the past 15 years. Jobs' successor is Tim Cook, an Alabaman who joined Apple in 1998 and has been the company's chief operating officer since 2007. Cook has served as interim CEO twice, and he's essentially been acting as CEO throughout Jobs' medical leave this year. Reuters profiled Cook, and All Things Digital's John Paczkowski said that while he's not going to be the visionary leader that Jobs was, he's the steady hand that Apple needs right now. The Atlantic's Nicholas Jackson said that Cook has learned to emulate Jobs as well as anyone could and noted all of the successful launches he's presided over. Wired's Tim Carmody wrote the most thorough defense of Cook as Jobs' successor, detailing his history with the company and his logistics innovations in particular. The consensus on the Jobs-to-Cook transition seemed to be that Apple is losing a uniquely influential, irreplaceable CEO, but that the company is strong enough to stay well ahead of its competition anyway. Business Insider's Matt Rosoff cataloged what Apple will lose with Jobs, and msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman took stock of where Apple stands as Jobs leaving, suggesting that it might need to start working harder to fight for market share. Slate's Farhad Manjoo argued that Jobs has set his company up perfectly to continue his success, and Reuters' Felix Salmon predicted this transition will go down as a textbook example of a well-executed succession plan. Cook, for his part, assured Apple employees that the company's not going to change. — Two media legends leave their posts: The other two men to depart were in the media world: Poynter's pioneering media blogger Jim Romenesko and Slate media critic Jack Shafer. Romenesko, who's been running the definitive blog for news on the journalism business since the late '90s, will be semi-retiring in January, occasionally contributing reported media pieces to Poynter and doing some writing on a new personal site. The Huffington Post's Michael Arrington broke the news, and Romenesko's editor, Julie Moos, explained it from Poynter's perspective, detailing their ongoing transition of Romenesko to a group blog. Poynter's Bill Mitchell told the story of Romenesko's tenure at Poynter, and touched on some of the enormous influence he's had: He chronicled one of the most important eras in journalism, helped aggregation be seen as a journalistic craft, and "brought transparency to newsrooms, equipping readers and staffers alike to hold those organizations accountable in the way that they scrutinize the operations of others." The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder also reflected on Romenesko's impact, and others chimed in on Twitter: Rare Planet's Patrick Thornton said he "showed journalists that good curation is journalism," and the New York Times' Brian Stelter (who founded TVNewser) and paidContent founder Rafat Ali said he inspired them to start their sites. And while Wired's Tim Carmody called him "Twitter before Twitter," Romenesko himself told the New York Times he found himself disoriented by the rise of social media, saying, "My role kind of vanished." Shafer was one of four laid off from Slate, where he had written about media since 1996, the year the site was founded. Just hours before the news came down, the American Journalism Review had posted a profile of Shafer, with several luminaries praising his fearlessness and his meticulous research and reporting. The layoff spurred a lot of confusion and complaints on Twitter and elsewhere, led by AJR's Rem Rieder, who called the decision "befuddling and disappointing." Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy also questioned the move, calling Shafer a "dogged reporter in a field where too many media critics would prefer to sit back and pontificate" and praising his iconoclastic perspective in an environment dominated by lockstep liberals and conservatives. Media critic Erik Wemple of the Washington Post said the layoffs weren't so preposterous given the financial struggles of Slate's owner, the Washington Post Co., but Forbes' Jeff Bercovici wondered if Slate's general-interest approach to the web still makes sense. Hamilton Nolan of Gawker used the occasion to opine on the decline of the media critic. Shafer, meanwhile, talked to Adweek about how he approached his job and what's next for him. — What should online identity be?: As Google+ grows, it's also drawing its share of detractors in the tech world, with various gripes about the new social network. Tech guru Robert Scoble, one of Google+'s heaviest users, also said it won't be ready to go beyond the tech crowd until it finds a way to cut down on the noise. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram echoed that thought and added a complaint about the difficulty of finding new users to connect with. Others are pushing back against that: The Huffington Post's Craig Kannalley said Google+ has all the building blocks of a successful platform, and MySpace founder Tom Anderson said you'll eventually be using it. One of the primary complaints about Google+ since its launch has been its real-names policy, and Mathew Ingram continued to beat that drum this week, saying that Google lacks transparency about its motives, suggesting that Google allow any pseudonym users desire but also offer verified identities for users that request it. Web editing veteran Derek Powazek defended Google, arguing that the notion that no one on the web uses their real name is dead: "Outside of a few legitimate edge cases and the occasional sci-fi fantasy, who we are online is simply who we are." Even though there's still a need for a space for anonymous speech online, he said, it's not up to corporations like Google to provide it for us. The discussion about real names also extended again into the area of comment sections this week, with Time's Graeme McMillan arguing that Facebook comments make those sections more civil, and the Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins noting that Facebook comments don't necessarily solve the anonymity problem. Echo's Chris Saad said real names aren't the real issue with comment sections for media companies, and an Ad Age survey found that most online readers don't care about comments. — Integrating new media into journalism training: A note from across the pond: In a survey released this week, members of Britain's National Council for the Training of Journalists cast an emphatic vote for traditional media skills over new media expertise when it comes to the group's prestigious National Certification Examination. (The exam is used as a qualification for newsroom positions, and helps determine pay in some cases.) Those results upset a number of British journalists who saw them as evidence of a technology-averse media establishment. The Guardian's Martin Belam worried that today's young journalists are being "encouraged to pay for qualifications that will equip them to work in a 90s newsroom, because the people designing the courses and the industry input they receive are all from people who cut their teeth in a 90s newsroom." J-prof Andy Dickinson called the group's desires journalism training for the common denominator, not the future. Numerous other journalists — Wales Online's Alison Gow, Reed Business Information's Adam Tinworth, David Higgerson of Trinity Mirror, and American Kerry Northrup — made a similar point: It's a fallacy, they said, to think of social media, multimedia and web proficiency as separate skills from the classic skills of reporting and storytelling — they're just other platforms on which to apply those skills. — Reading roundup: Really, there was other stuff going on this week than important people leaving their jobs. Here's a taste: — A site called The Daily Dot launched this week with the goal of being "the web's community newspaper." So what does that mean? It's trying to cover the web's social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube with reporting like a small-town paper might do. Adweek, Mashable, and VentureBeat have features on it, and one of its founders, Nicholas White, gave some lessons from his experience. — The long-hated rule known as the Fairness Doctrine was officially taken off the books by the U.S. Federal Communications Communication this week. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum said goodbye. — A few News Corp. notes: The (News Corp.-owned) Wall Street Journal looked at how the plans to tap the phone of a 13-year-old murder victim went awry at News of the World, the Daily Beast's Brian Cathcart focused on the investigator at the center of that scandal, and the Los Angeles Times' Joe Flint looked at News Corp.'s influence-peddling game here in the U.S. — Two posts to leave you with: Maria Popova's fantastic post here at the Lab on the new rarity in the information abundance of the web, and some more great advice for journalism students from the Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 01:59:18 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=882

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 19, 2011.] Is social media killing big ideas?: In the New York Times this week, USC fellow Neal Gabler put forward a different form of the familiar "information overload" complaint, this time tying the proliferation of social media to the paucity of big ideas. We don't spend time thinking about and valuing big ideas, he argued, because we're too busy trying to process — and add to — the flood of information coming at us through social media. You can't think and tweet at the same time, Gabler said, because tweeting "is a form of distraction or anti-thinking." Naturally, this didn't go over particularly well among the online media punditry. Several people countered that one of Twitter's functions is to direct users to big ideas, to point outside of its 140-character limits through hyperlinks. Media prof Chuck Tryon, author Stephen Baker, and Techdirt's Mike Masnick all made that argument, with Masnick summing it up well: "While social media may not have enlarged Gabler's intellectual universe, it has massively enlarged mine. Thanks to Twitter specifically, I've been able to meet tons of fascinatingly smart people I never would have met otherwise." The trick, as Baker said, is to "listen to the right people, and then follow their links." Two other writers made particularly smart points: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones noted that where before we knew exactly where to find big ideas and how to discuss them, we're now in the middle of a massive media transition. That doesn't mean the big idea is dead, he said, it means it's headed somewhere new, and we don't know exactly where yet. And the Lab's Megan Garber pointed out that Gabler's vision of big ideas is closely tied to big media, but argued that those big ideas don't need big media to thrive. Instead, she said, "Increasingly, though, the ideas that spark progress are collective, diffusive endeavors rather than the result (to the extent they ever were) of individual inspiration." — A paywall plan that understands online readers?: Reuters blogger Felix Salmon is already on record as a supporter of the New York Times' five-month-old paywall, and this week he detailed exactly why he thinks it's so effective. Salmon likened the Times' metered model, with all of its leeway and potential workarounds, to a polite "Please keep off the grass" sign. He argued that contra the prevailing philosophy that readers won't pay for something they can get for free, the Times is betting that "the pleasure of reading its content will be enough to persuade a large number of people to pay. It’s a far more attractive model, and one which is much more likely to attract new young subscribers over the long term." In a follow-up post, Salmon explained why the Times' model is fundamentally different from the Financial Times' pay meter — it's not trying nearly as hard to keep non-subscribers away from its content. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman agreed with Salmon's premise: Wilson praised the efficacy of getting paid after the fact rather than before, and Sonderman said the Times has discovered that convenience, duty, and appreciation are more compelling motivations than coercion. There was one notable dissenter: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, who took issue with the idea that the Times' plan has been successful, arguing instead that it's not growing the paper's online audience, but setting up digital sandbags to protect a declining print product. The plan "has virtually nothing to do with actually taking advantage of the digital world in any concrete way," Ingram wrote. "It’s just charging people nickels and dimes for their paper, the way the NYT and other newspapers have for a century and a half or so." — News Corp.'s problems continue to grow: The damning information against News Corp. in the phone-hacking scandal at its former News of the World newspaper keeps on coming. This week, it was a four-year-old letter written by Clive Goodman, a reporter at the center of the scandal. In it, Goodman said that the hacking was discussed regularly at the paper and suggested that knowledge of it ran much deeper than News Corp. has been insisting. Notably, News Corp. had submitted the letter to Parliament but redacted the incriminating parts. With the new revelation, Slate's Jack Shafer wrote that "the scandal has grown too large for one or two willing Murdoch lieutenants or employees to stanch it by taking the fall." That impression has led many watchers to wonder, as the Guardian's Brian Cathcart did, if James Murdoch, Rupert's son, may be forced to resign. James responded late last week to Parliament's questions about his truthfulness in his testimony to them last month, and News Corp. is reportedly making plans in case he decides to step aside. The bad news continues to pile up elsewhere in News Corp., too. The private investigator at the center of the scandal sued News International (the company's British newspaper division) for not paying his legal bills, and officially acknowledged in its annual report that the scandal could impair its business, and that it doesn't know how much money it'll end up costing. Two more commentators — the New Yorker's Ken Auletta and Reuters' David Callahan — echoed a popular sentiment lately, saying the responsibility for this whole ordeal lies directly with Rupert Murdoch. — Google grabs a mobile-phone producer: For the tech geeks among us, Google made some big news this week, buying Motorola Mobility, Motorola's mobile devices division, for .5 billion. According to the New York Times, the deal had a lot to do with stockpiling patents in order to defend its Android mobile operating system from patent lawsuits. It also may allow Google to drive down development costs for the all-important smartphone and tablet markets. Cory Bergman of Lost Remote noted that this move isn't just about mobile, though — it also represents Google's biggest move into TV yet. With Motorola's significant share of the cable-TV hardware business, Bergman said, Google now has the opportunity to seamlessly integrate its technology with TVs across the world. Here at the Lab, Joshua Benton used the acquisition as an example of the tension between a Windows-style modular approach to business, with products that can be swapped in and out, and an Apple-esque interdependent one, with a set of interlinking, proprietary products. He also applied the idea to news, saying our journalistic ecosystem needs both the more open modular approach and the more packaged interdependent approach. A couple of other posts looked at the story of the deal itself: Reuters' Felix Salmon examined the decline (and declining value) of the financial scoops beat, and Gawker's Ryan Tate saw Google's manufactured press-release quotes by its business partners as a sign that Google is moving away from the "Don't Be Evil" mantra toward being a tight-fisted corporate giant. — Reading roundup: This week was a pretty packed one. Here's the best of the rest: — This week in AOL: The New York Times' Verne Kopytoff analyzed why the new-look AOL has experienced so many hiccups, and j-prof Dan Kennedy seized on the tidbit in that article that AOL would reportedly be profitable without Patch. — Web philosopher David Weinberger wrote a fantastic piece about the journalistic curiosity and community exchange that's present at Reddit, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram echoed his thoughts. — The Knight Digital Media Center's Joy Mayer has apparently become journalism's "Minister of Engagement," and she's earned the title, publishing a thorough guide to community engagement for newsrooms. — The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles wondered what journalism is worth, and came up with some depressing answers. — Finally, since classes are starting up all over the place in the next week or two, here's 10 great tips for journalism students from Sarah Marshall of Journalism.co.uk, via Twitter.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:49:33 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=866

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 12, 2011.] Murdoch passes Wall Street's test: The fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal continued to spread this week, with the reported arrest of another former News of the World editor and the report that the ostensibly fired News Corp. British chief, Rebekah Brooks, is still on the company payroll. Three weeks after testifying before Parliament, Rupert Murdoch faced Wall Street analysts this week in a conference call, telling them that he's not going anywhere and that the scandal hasn't done any material damage to the company outside of News of the World. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka said Wall Street really doesn't care about the hacking, and Murdoch didn't say much about the few questions he did get on it. Murdoch also had to meet with News Corp.'s board, but as the New York Times' Jeremy Peters reported, the board's officially independent members include numerous people who have deep personal ties to Murdoch. Perhaps more troubling was a different connection among one of the board members: According to Time's Massimo Calabresi, one of them is "best friends" with the district attorney leading the U.S. investigation into the company. The Times' David Carr uncovered more hints at News Corp.'s enormous political influence here in the States, detailing cases of swift approval of a merger by a Justice Department unit led by a future News Corp. executive, as well as a suspiciously dropped federal criminal case. "The company’s size and might give it a soft, less obvious power that it has been able to project to remarkable effect," Carr concluded. At Adweek, Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff went further, reporting that the Justice Department is considering investigating News Corp. on racketeering charges, though Forbes' Jeff Bercovici doubted that would happen. For a bit more info on the situation, here's a good Q&A with Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who's been all over the story. — AOL's slap from investors: This week hasn't been a good one for AOL: After it reported a quarterly loss on Tuesday, its stock dropped by about a quarter by the end of the day. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka gave a quick explainer of why investors are so down on AOL: What little money they're making isn't coming from the all-important display advertising business. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM added more depth to that analysis, arguing that investors are doubting AOL's assurances that its two big gambles — Patch and the acquisition of the Huffington Post — will pay off. According to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (paraphrased by Business Insider), the reason for those problems is that AOL's advertising side hasn't scaled well enough. Peter Kafka explained that AOL's advertising (especially display) is indeed up, though much of that can be attributed to the HuffPo and TechCrunch acquisitions. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici said AOL's public image problem has even damaged the previously successful HuffPo, quoting an analyst who called AOL a "dead brand." Wired's Tim Carmody decided to unite our two big stories this week and suggested that AOL would be a perfect fit for a purchase by News Corp. Meanwhile's AOL's local-news initiative, Patch, launched a Groupon-esque daily deal service, and Iowa grad student Robert Gutsche Jr.questioned Patch's standards for separating journalism and advertising — and got the runaround from Patch when he asked them about it. AOL's new daily tablet magazine, Editions, also drew some criticism, with Fast Company's Austin Carr perturbed that it's not AOL-y enough. — A news org gets into tablets: We've already seen numerous challengers to the iPad's early stranglehold on the tablet marketplace, but the Tribune Co. might be the first news company to try one out. CNN's Mark Milian reported that the newspaper chain is working on an Android-based tablet, which it's planning on offering it for free or very cheap to people who sign up for extended newspaper subscriptions. It's already missed a mid-August deadline for testing the tablet out. Media pundits didn't think much of the Tribune's idea. Wired's Tim Carmody urged the Tribune (and media companies in general) to quit developing tablets, arguing that it's way too hard to do if you're a major development company, let alone a news organization. "If major publishers are seriously prepared to blow up their primary revenue stream — print advertising — and slap together a giveaway tablet in order to save money on ink, God help them," he wrote. Others echoed Carmody's arguments: PaidContent's Tom Crazit called the project "a colossal waste of money for a company trying to emerge from bankruptcy." Chris Velazco of TechCrunch said the cheap-tablet model (also being talked about by Philadelphia Newspapers) isn't viable. Gizmodo's Brent Rose was less restrained: "WHY??" Morris Communications' Steve Yelvington was a little kinder to the Tribune, saying the numbers might add up, but the devil's in the details. — The Times gets experimental: The New York Times has frequently made strong pushes into news innovation over the past several years, and this week it started another one, launching a new public test kitchen for projects in development. The Lab's Megan Garber explained what the site, beta620, is all about, but GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, while applauding the effort, expressed some doubt about whether the Times is really capable of developing a startup's mindset. Tim Carmody of Wired, on the other hand, said the startup analogy isn't the right one for the Times. With these projects, he said, "The New York Times has become an openly experimental public institution. It’s less a cathedral consecrated to its own past than a free museum where patrons are invited to touch and transform everything they see." Poynter's Jeff Sonderman had some suggestions for next steps for the Times to take with beta620: experimenting with design, getting away from the long narrative article, and rethinking comments. — The real-name debate: One long-simmering debate I want to briefly catch you up on: Google+ has decided to take the Facebook route of disallowing pseudonyms, adjusting but reaffirming its policy in the face of online criticism late last month and again on Thursday. The outcry continued, voiced most prominently late last week by social media researcher danah boyd, who asserted that "'real names' policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people." Liz Gannes of All Things Digital said she understands Google's motivations for enforcing real names and unifying everything under its umbrella within the same identity, but the idea of doing the latter is awkward at best and frightening at worst. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, meanwhile, announced he's changed his mind against real-name policies, arguing that requiring real names online is a radical departure from the relationship between speech and identity in the offline world. — Reading roundup: A few other things to keep an eye on this week: — Amazon released a version of its Kindle app for browsers, called the Kindle Cloud Reader. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said the browser-based e-book app (which bypasses Apple's restrictions) could be a roadmap for the future of the web, but Wired's Tim Carmody said it still doesn't get the web. — Google announced it's making its hand-chosen Editors' Picks a standing feature on Google News. The Lab's Megan Garber explained what Google's doing with it. Meanwhile, James Gleick at The New York Review of Books offered a thoughtful piece on Google's domination of our online lives. — Adweek explained an underrated obstacle to innovation and progress in news organizations' online efforts: the intractable CMS. — Steve Buttry, now with the Journal Register Co., gave his lessons from TBD's demise on the Washington local news site's first birthday. It's short but solid. Enjoy.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:36:45 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=858

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 29, 2011.] Debating the Times' paywall and design: In its quarterly earnings call late last week, the New York Times gave the clearest picture yet of how its new online pay plan is working. As usual, it turned out to be something of a Rorschach test: BNET's Erik Sherman called the numbers evidence that the paywall isn't protecting the Times' print subscriptions, as it was intended to. On the other hand, the Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum argued that the Times' big digital subscription figure (224,000) "proves that, contra the naysayers, readers will pay good money for quality news." The Times' paywall adds an important digital revenue stream, he said, while also letting in enough casual readers to keep the value of digital advertising up. The most thorough defense of the Times, though, came from New York magazine's Seth Mnookin: "The Times has taken a do-or-die stand for hard-core, boots-on-the-ground journalism, for earnest civic purpose, for the primacy of content creators over aggregators, and has brought itself back from the precipice."BNET's Jim Edwards said it's premature for Mnookin to say the Times is back, but Reuters' Felix Salmon, a former Times paywall skeptic, agreed with Mnookin that the paywall is working, saying he's glad the Times has shown a porous paywall can work. The other Times-related item is firmly in the hypothetical realm, but it generated at least as much conversation as the real-world pay plan. Last week, web designer Andy Rutledge critiqued the Times' online design and proposed his own version, emphasizing headlines, time stamps, authors, and separating news from opinion. The response wasn't particularly positive. The redesign was generally trashed on Twitter, with a typical sentiment expressed by 10,000 Words' Lauren Rabaino: "It’s hard to take seriously a design that completely ignores the constraints of a typical newspaper." One of the most comprehensive responses came from Guardian developer Martin Belam, who pointed out things like faces, article summaries, and points of social connection that Rutledge was missing. The Lab's Joshua Benton argued that Rutledge's redesign doesn't acknowledge that "the problems of large-scale information architecture for news sites are really hard problems." Meanwhile, Belgian developer Stijn Debrouwere went the other direction, asking for more unrealistic mockups like this one to help us brainstorm what news sites could look like. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said the problem with the Times' site is that it's designed as if readers are interested in everything the paper produces, which is almost never the case. And Paul Scrivens said both Rutledge and the Times should look outside the news industry for design cues. — Google+ growing pains: Google+ continues to grow at a ridiculous pace — far faster than either Facebook or Twitter, as Idealab's Bill Gross pointed out — and as Simon Dumenco of Ad Age argued, the platform represents a social media do-over for a lot of users. It's still generating dissent, though, with much of it stemming from Google+'s policy toward business pages. As Google's Christian Oestlien wrote late last week, the company is working on a business profile template that will be up in the next few months, but they're deleting business pages (including news organization pages) in the meantime. A few companies will get trial pages before they're available to everyone, and others have found workarounds — the tech blog Mashable managed to keep all its followers by simply changing its page name to the name of its CEO, Pete Cashmore. That got other members of the tech press worked up, including Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, who urged Google to restore the deleted pages and let businesses create pages normally. TechCrunch's MG Siegler said Google is essentially creating its own version of Twitter's Suggested User List, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM made the case for why this is a big deal. Elsewhere in the world of Google+, Mathew Ingram wrote about the issues it's dealing with regarding anonymity, and the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal is experimenting with a daily news roundup on his personal page there. The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined Google+'s usefulness as a news tool, concluding that while it has potential, it needs a bigger, broader user base to start to really challenge Twitter and Facebook. — The end of media moguls?: The News Corp. phone hacking scandal shifted down a gear this week, but there were still a few developments to report. The News of the World hacking victims also reportedly included the mother of an 8-year-old murder victim, and two former employees testified that they had told James Murdoch that the hacking was widespread, contradicting what Murdoch had told Parliament last week. Other News Corp. veterans challenged the picture Rupert Murdoch painted of himself as a largely hands-off newspaper boss. The New York Times' David Carr wrote that James Murdoch is done, and that Rupert has finally been revealed as vulnerable. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis was more emphatic, calling Murdoch the last media mogul: "The mogul is extinct. The kind of big media institution he built will follow him. Lovely chaos will follow. It’s called democracy." The Washington Post's Erik Wemple took a quick look at what a post-Murdoch world might look like. A couple of other News Corp.-related avenues to chase down: Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review argued that a scandal like News of the World's won't happen in the U.S., and News Corp.'s newest property, the tablet publication The Daily, appears to be floundering, according to a New York Observer feature, though a new version was released last week. — Reading roundup: There wasn't a whole lot to take in this week, but here's a quick sampling: — The FCC is releasing a series of studies on media ownership, one of the newest of which suggested that media cross-ownership (ownership of multiple media outlets within a single market) doesn't hurt local news, and may actually help it. — Wisconsin j-prof Stephen Ward made a thoughtful case for redefining objectivity in the digital age. — Particularly for the Twitter skeptics and writing teachers out there, Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore put together a great post outlining the ways Twitter has made her a better writer. — Finally, I've been trying to cover this piecemeal discussion here, but the AP's Jonathan Stray did a much better job of summarizing the recent conversation about the changing structure of news stories with a fantastic reading list. Now that you're done with this link-fest, be sure to give that one a look-through, too.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/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-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-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/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:16:35 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=886

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 2, 2011.] Hurricane news' innovation and hype: The big U.S. news story this week was Hurricane Irene, which hit the East Coast and New England last weekend. It was a story that hit particularly close to home for many of the U.S.' leading news organizations, which led to some innovative journalism, but also some questionable coverage, too. Several news organizations temporarily took down their online paywalls during the storm, led by the New York Times and the Long Island newspaper Newsday. The Times also used the storm as an opportunity to introduce a new Twitter account devoted to curation of information on Twitter by the paper's editors. The Lab's Megan Garber noted that the account is incorporating much more conversation than the Times' other official Twitter accounts, and Jeff Sonderman of Poynter talked to the Times about its goal with the account — to provide a space for faster, more unrestrained information from the Times on Twitter. Another good example of storm-related news innovation: The Journal Register Co.'s Ben Franklin Project. Irene was also a big occasion for TV news, which trotted out the usual round-the-clock coverage and on-location weather-defying reports. After the storm passed through, many questioned whether news organizations had gone over the top in their breathless coverage of Irene. The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz accused cable news of being "utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon," and at the Boston Herald, Michael Graham called the Irene coverage "a manufactured media product with a tenuous connection to the actual news." Others (many outside the TV news industry) pushed back against those charges: Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy said that the storm's damage actually largely matched the coverage; it just seemed like it fizzled out because that damage wasn't near New York or Washington. The New York Times' Nate Silver took a more scientific approach and made a similar conclusion, showing that the amount of Irene coverage was generally in line with that of previous storms, when the level of damage was factored in. Poynter's Julie Moos, who put together a great summary of the hurricane hype debate, also argued that Irene's severity matched the level of coverage, providing along the way a useful six-part measuring stick for journalistic hype. "The perception of hype is fed by the gap between supply and demand," she said. "Journalists must make more closely calibrated decisions than ever about what information to provide." — Social network as identity service: Google CEO Eric Schmidt threw some more fuel onto the slow-burning argument over Google+ and real names when he said at a conference last weekend that the new social network is essentially an "identity service with a link structure around your friends" — a way for others on the Internet to verify your identity and communicate with you under that identity. Asked about the risks to some people of such a hard-and-fast online identity, Schmidt replied that, well, they don't have to use Google+ then. It was quite a telling quote regarding Google+'s true purpose — one that several commentators seized on. Mashable's Pete Cashmore described the battle between Google and Facebook over web identity and reasoned that the reason Google is taking a hard line on real names is that it needs its identity system to be more reliable than Facebook's. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson said now we officially know who the real-names policy is really for: Google, not us. "The answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to," he said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram used the statement to tie together his description of what's at stake in the identity competition — the more accurate and detailed identities are, the more advertisers will pay for them. Tech blogger Dave Winer was more blunt: Google+ is a bank, he said. They need people's real names because they want to move money around, like any other business. At the Guardian, tech writer Cory Doctorow argued that we need to open up this discussion about online identity, and that the single-identity philosophy Google's espousing isn't in our best interests. Meanwhile, this month's Carnival of Journalism blog ring wrote about Google+, with several writers urging journalists and academics to "just use it," as the University of Colorado's Steve Outing put it. Spot.Us' David Cohn put the rationale well: "The reason to be on Google+ isn’t because it’s the newest, hottest, sexiest thing. ... You should be on these sites to understand how people are communicating and the vocabulary of this communication." — CNN grabs Zite: Major news organizations have been itching to jump into the increasingly crowded market for tablet-based news readers, and this week CNN made its own play, snatching up Zite, the personalized, magazine-like iPad news app launched in March. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher put the purchase price between million and million and explained the simple reason for CNN's interest: They're trying to acquire the technology to keep up with audiences that are quickly moving onto mobile platforms for their news. Zite will continue to operate as a separate unit, across the country from CNN's headquarters. According to mocoNews' Tom Krazit, CNN will help Zite scale up to a bigger audience, while Zite will work to improve CNN's mobile offerings. And when asked by Mashable's Lauren Indvik about adding ads, CNN execs said they're going to build up the product first and worry about the business model later. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said Zite can help CNN learn what people are sharing, why, and how they want news presented in a mobile format. — WikiLeaks' inadvertent cable release: This week marked what looks like the beginning of a new, bizarre confusing chapter in the WikiLeaks saga. The story's been a bit of a confusing story, but I'll try to break it down for you: Ever since last November, WikiLeaks has been gradually releasing documents from its collection of diplomatic cables. But over the past couple of weeks, the full archive of 251,000 cables was inadvertently released online, without sensitive information redacted, as WikiLeaks had been doing. WikiLeaks blamed the Guardian, the British newspaper with which it had been working, for publishing the password to the hidden document files in a book about WikiLeaks earlier this year. The Guardian responded that it was told when it was given the password that it was temporary, to be changed within a day. In the meantime, as Der Spiegel explained well, Daniel Domscheit-Berg had defected from WikiLeaks with the server that contained the files, and other WikiLeaks supporters spread the files around to keep them from being taken off the web. Once the password leaked out, the contents of the files gradually started spilling online, and by Wednesday night, they were completely public, according to Der Spiegel. It's not entirely clear what WikiLeaks will do with the files now, but that's where the conflict stands. — FT pulls out of the App Store: Back in June, the Financial Times became the first major news organization to develop an HTML5 app for Apple's App Store, allowing it to design a single app for multiple platforms and to handle subscriptions outside of the app itself, which gave it a way around Apple's 30% cut. FT removed the app from the App Store this week instead of complying with Apple's requirement that all subscriptions be handled within apps. As paidContent's Robert Andrews explained, FT can still make money off of existing iPad app users, but the paper says most of its users have switched over the web app, and its web app use is growing quickly enough that this isn't a big loss anyway. As GigaOM's Darrell Etherington pointed out, this could be an important test case in whether a news organization can replace its Apple-based app business with an HTML5-based web app. — A new generation of campaign reporters: We're starting to hurtle toward full-on presidential campaign season in the U.S., and according to the New York Times, many of the reporters who'll be covering it are 20-somethings, mere babes in the dark, scary woods of campaign journalism. The Times did a trend story on these young reporters, focusing on a boot camp for them put on by CBS and National Journal. Among the advice they're getting: Be careful to slip up in public view, and don't break news on Twitter. Mocking, of course, ensued. Village Voice's Rosie Gray said CBS and National Journal are asking to get beat on big stories with their Twitter policy, and Alex Pareene of Salon said the moral of the story is that modern campaign journalism is so inane that it can be pushed off to barely experienced reporters without anyone being the wiser. The Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry had perhaps the most substantive concern: Why are these reporters being taught primarily about avoiding gaffes, rather than actually doing good journalism? — Reading roundup: Here's the rest of what happened in this crazy-busy news week: — The New York Times' public editor, Arthur Brisbane, wrote a column criticizing the Times' popular DealBook site for missing large-scale economic issues in favor of small, incremental daily stories. Times business editor Larry Ingrassia fired back with a defense of DealBook, and Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon also defended DealBook, saying Brisbane was making a false either-or distinction, among other errors. — A few more reflections and analyses of Steve Jobs' impending departure as Apple CEO, announced last week: The New York Times' David Carr on what he changed, and Wired's John C. Abell on Jobs' legacy and Tim Carmody on Jobs and the arts. — He's made the point before in different ways, but NYU j-prof Jay Rosen's analysis of why the system of political news coverage is broken is still worth a read. He also followed it up with a rethinking of what political journalism could be. — Finally, NPR's Matt Thompson wrote a great piece on what journalists can learn from the scientific method, tying together some useful big ideas.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:09:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=884

This Week in Review: Remembering Steve Jobs, and a new-old media partnership

This Week in Review: TBD gets the axe, deciphering Apple’s new rules, and empowering more news sources

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 26, 2011.] Apple begins life after Jobs: This week in the media and tech world was defined by three men's departures, all announced on Wednesday. By far the biggest was Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple, 35 years after he founded the company. The decision was largely health-driven, as Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and has been on medical leave since January. Jobs will continue to be Apple's chairman, and as the Wall Street Journal reported, he'll still be involved in product development. The announcement has drawn a massive amount of commentary, and Techmeme is the best place to gorge yourself on it — or you can read Adam Penenberg's mashup. Here's a small selection of some of the most interesting stuff, starting with the reflections on Jobs' legacy: All Things Digital's Walt Mossberg put together a sharp little rundown of the ways Jobs has changed the computing, animation, music, and mobile media industries. (TV is next.) Tech blogger John Gruber marveled at the company Jobs has built, saying, "Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself." Om Malik of GigaOM said Jobs taught us that building the future requires taking the long view, and tech guru Robert Scoble praised Jobs as a CEO who genuinely cared about his products, not just profits. If you're looking for more on Jobs himself, Byliner highlighted seven definitive profiles of the man from the past 15 years. Jobs' successor is Tim Cook, an Alabaman who joined Apple in 1998 and has been the company's chief operating officer since 2007. Cook has served as interim CEO twice, and he's essentially been acting as CEO throughout Jobs' medical leave this year. Reuters profiled Cook, and All Things Digital's John Paczkowski said that while he's not going to be the visionary leader that Jobs was, he's the steady hand that Apple needs right now. The Atlantic's Nicholas Jackson said that Cook has learned to emulate Jobs as well as anyone could and noted all of the successful launches he's presided over. Wired's Tim Carmody wrote the most thorough defense of Cook as Jobs' successor, detailing his history with the company and his logistics innovations in particular. The consensus on the Jobs-to-Cook transition seemed to be that Apple is losing a uniquely influential, irreplaceable CEO, but that the company is strong enough to stay well ahead of its competition anyway. Business Insider's Matt Rosoff cataloged what Apple will lose with Jobs, and msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman took stock of where Apple stands as Jobs leaving, suggesting that it might need to start working harder to fight for market share. Slate's Farhad Manjoo argued that Jobs has set his company up perfectly to continue his success, and Reuters' Felix Salmon predicted this transition will go down as a textbook example of a well-executed succession plan. Cook, for his part, assured Apple employees that the company's not going to change. — Two media legends leave their posts: The other two men to depart were in the media world: Poynter's pioneering media blogger Jim Romenesko and Slate media critic Jack Shafer. Romenesko, who's been running the definitive blog for news on the journalism business since the late '90s, will be semi-retiring in January, occasionally contributing reported media pieces to Poynter and doing some writing on a new personal site. The Huffington Post's Michael Arrington broke the news, and Romenesko's editor, Julie Moos, explained it from Poynter's perspective, detailing their ongoing transition of Romenesko to a group blog. Poynter's Bill Mitchell told the story of Romenesko's tenure at Poynter, and touched on some of the enormous influence he's had: He chronicled one of the most important eras in journalism, helped aggregation be seen as a journalistic craft, and "brought transparency to newsrooms, equipping readers and staffers alike to hold those organizations accountable in the way that they scrutinize the operations of others." The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder also reflected on Romenesko's impact, and others chimed in on Twitter: Rare Planet's Patrick Thornton said he "showed journalists that good curation is journalism," and the New York Times' Brian Stelter (who founded TVNewser) and paidContent founder Rafat Ali said he inspired them to start their sites. And while Wired's Tim Carmody called him "Twitter before Twitter," Romenesko himself told the New York Times he found himself disoriented by the rise of social media, saying, "My role kind of vanished." Shafer was one of four laid off from Slate, where he had written about media since 1996, the year the site was founded. Just hours before the news came down, the American Journalism Review had posted a profile of Shafer, with several luminaries praising his fearlessness and his meticulous research and reporting. The layoff spurred a lot of confusion and complaints on Twitter and elsewhere, led by AJR's Rem Rieder, who called the decision "befuddling and disappointing." Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy also questioned the move, calling Shafer a "dogged reporter in a field where too many media critics would prefer to sit back and pontificate" and praising his iconoclastic perspective in an environment dominated by lockstep liberals and conservatives. Media critic Erik Wemple of the Washington Post said the layoffs weren't so preposterous given the financial struggles of Slate's owner, the Washington Post Co., but Forbes' Jeff Bercovici wondered if Slate's general-interest approach to the web still makes sense. Hamilton Nolan of Gawker used the occasion to opine on the decline of the media critic. Shafer, meanwhile, talked to Adweek about how he approached his job and what's next for him. — What should online identity be?: As Google+ grows, it's also drawing its share of detractors in the tech world, with various gripes about the new social network. Tech guru Robert Scoble, one of Google+'s heaviest users, also said it won't be ready to go beyond the tech crowd until it finds a way to cut down on the noise. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram echoed that thought and added a complaint about the difficulty of finding new users to connect with. Others are pushing back against that: The Huffington Post's Craig Kannalley said Google+ has all the building blocks of a successful platform, and MySpace founder Tom Anderson said you'll eventually be using it. One of the primary complaints about Google+ since its launch has been its real-names policy, and Mathew Ingram continued to beat that drum this week, saying that Google lacks transparency about its motives, suggesting that Google allow any pseudonym users desire but also offer verified identities for users that request it. Web editing veteran Derek Powazek defended Google, arguing that the notion that no one on the web uses their real name is dead: "Outside of a few legitimate edge cases and the occasional sci-fi fantasy, who we are online is simply who we are." Even though there's still a need for a space for anonymous speech online, he said, it's not up to corporations like Google to provide it for us. The discussion about real names also extended again into the area of comment sections this week, with Time's Graeme McMillan arguing that Facebook comments make those sections more civil, and the Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins noting that Facebook comments don't necessarily solve the anonymity problem. Echo's Chris Saad said real names aren't the real issue with comment sections for media companies, and an Ad Age survey found that most online readers don't care about comments. — Integrating new media into journalism training: A note from across the pond: In a survey released this week, members of Britain's National Council for the Training of Journalists cast an emphatic vote for traditional media skills over new media expertise when it comes to the group's prestigious National Certification Examination. (The exam is used as a qualification for newsroom positions, and helps determine pay in some cases.) Those results upset a number of British journalists who saw them as evidence of a technology-averse media establishment. The Guardian's Martin Belam worried that today's young journalists are being "encouraged to pay for qualifications that will equip them to work in a 90s newsroom, because the people designing the courses and the industry input they receive are all from people who cut their teeth in a 90s newsroom." J-prof Andy Dickinson called the group's desires journalism training for the common denominator, not the future. Numerous other journalists — Wales Online's Alison Gow, Reed Business Information's Adam Tinworth, David Higgerson of Trinity Mirror, and American Kerry Northrup — made a similar point: It's a fallacy, they said, to think of social media, multimedia and web proficiency as separate skills from the classic skills of reporting and storytelling — they're just other platforms on which to apply those skills. — Reading roundup: Really, there was other stuff going on this week than important people leaving their jobs. Here's a taste: — A site called The Daily Dot launched this week with the goal of being "the web's community newspaper." So what does that mean? It's trying to cover the web's social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube with reporting like a small-town paper might do. Adweek, Mashable, and VentureBeat have features on it, and one of its founders, Nicholas White, gave some lessons from his experience. — The long-hated rule known as the Fairness Doctrine was officially taken off the books by the U.S. Federal Communications Communication this week. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum said goodbye. — A few News Corp. notes: The (News Corp.-owned) Wall Street Journal looked at how the plans to tap the phone of a 13-year-old murder victim went awry at News of the World, the Daily Beast's Brian Cathcart focused on the investigator at the center of that scandal, and the Los Angeles Times' Joe Flint looked at News Corp.'s influence-peddling game here in the U.S. — Two posts to leave you with: Maria Popova's fantastic post here at the Lab on the new rarity in the information abundance of the web, and some more great advice for journalism students from the Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 01:59:18 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=882

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 19, 2011.] Is social media killing big ideas?: In the New York Times this week, USC fellow Neal Gabler put forward a different form of the familiar "information overload" complaint, this time tying the proliferation of social media to the paucity of big ideas. We don't spend time thinking about and valuing big ideas, he argued, because we're too busy trying to process — and add to — the flood of information coming at us through social media. You can't think and tweet at the same time, Gabler said, because tweeting "is a form of distraction or anti-thinking." Naturally, this didn't go over particularly well among the online media punditry. Several people countered that one of Twitter's functions is to direct users to big ideas, to point outside of its 140-character limits through hyperlinks. Media prof Chuck Tryon, author Stephen Baker, and Techdirt's Mike Masnick all made that argument, with Masnick summing it up well: "While social media may not have enlarged Gabler's intellectual universe, it has massively enlarged mine. Thanks to Twitter specifically, I've been able to meet tons of fascinatingly smart people I never would have met otherwise." The trick, as Baker said, is to "listen to the right people, and then follow their links." Two other writers made particularly smart points: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones noted that where before we knew exactly where to find big ideas and how to discuss them, we're now in the middle of a massive media transition. That doesn't mean the big idea is dead, he said, it means it's headed somewhere new, and we don't know exactly where yet. And the Lab's Megan Garber pointed out that Gabler's vision of big ideas is closely tied to big media, but argued that those big ideas don't need big media to thrive. Instead, she said, "Increasingly, though, the ideas that spark progress are collective, diffusive endeavors rather than the result (to the extent they ever were) of individual inspiration." — A paywall plan that understands online readers?: Reuters blogger Felix Salmon is already on record as a supporter of the New York Times' five-month-old paywall, and this week he detailed exactly why he thinks it's so effective. Salmon likened the Times' metered model, with all of its leeway and potential workarounds, to a polite "Please keep off the grass" sign. He argued that contra the prevailing philosophy that readers won't pay for something they can get for free, the Times is betting that "the pleasure of reading its content will be enough to persuade a large number of people to pay. It’s a far more attractive model, and one which is much more likely to attract new young subscribers over the long term." In a follow-up post, Salmon explained why the Times' model is fundamentally different from the Financial Times' pay meter — it's not trying nearly as hard to keep non-subscribers away from its content. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman agreed with Salmon's premise: Wilson praised the efficacy of getting paid after the fact rather than before, and Sonderman said the Times has discovered that convenience, duty, and appreciation are more compelling motivations than coercion. There was one notable dissenter: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, who took issue with the idea that the Times' plan has been successful, arguing instead that it's not growing the paper's online audience, but setting up digital sandbags to protect a declining print product. The plan "has virtually nothing to do with actually taking advantage of the digital world in any concrete way," Ingram wrote. "It’s just charging people nickels and dimes for their paper, the way the NYT and other newspapers have for a century and a half or so." — News Corp.'s problems continue to grow: The damning information against News Corp. in the phone-hacking scandal at its former News of the World newspaper keeps on coming. This week, it was a four-year-old letter written by Clive Goodman, a reporter at the center of the scandal. In it, Goodman said that the hacking was discussed regularly at the paper and suggested that knowledge of it ran much deeper than News Corp. has been insisting. Notably, News Corp. had submitted the letter to Parliament but redacted the incriminating parts. With the new revelation, Slate's Jack Shafer wrote that "the scandal has grown too large for one or two willing Murdoch lieutenants or employees to stanch it by taking the fall." That impression has led many watchers to wonder, as the Guardian's Brian Cathcart did, if James Murdoch, Rupert's son, may be forced to resign. James responded late last week to Parliament's questions about his truthfulness in his testimony to them last month, and News Corp. is reportedly making plans in case he decides to step aside. The bad news continues to pile up elsewhere in News Corp., too. The private investigator at the center of the scandal sued News International (the company's British newspaper division) for not paying his legal bills, and officially acknowledged in its annual report that the scandal could impair its business, and that it doesn't know how much money it'll end up costing. Two more commentators — the New Yorker's Ken Auletta and Reuters' David Callahan — echoed a popular sentiment lately, saying the responsibility for this whole ordeal lies directly with Rupert Murdoch. — Google grabs a mobile-phone producer: For the tech geeks among us, Google made some big news this week, buying Motorola Mobility, Motorola's mobile devices division, for .5 billion. According to the New York Times, the deal had a lot to do with stockpiling patents in order to defend its Android mobile operating system from patent lawsuits. It also may allow Google to drive down development costs for the all-important smartphone and tablet markets. Cory Bergman of Lost Remote noted that this move isn't just about mobile, though — it also represents Google's biggest move into TV yet. With Motorola's significant share of the cable-TV hardware business, Bergman said, Google now has the opportunity to seamlessly integrate its technology with TVs across the world. Here at the Lab, Joshua Benton used the acquisition as an example of the tension between a Windows-style modular approach to business, with products that can be swapped in and out, and an Apple-esque interdependent one, with a set of interlinking, proprietary products. He also applied the idea to news, saying our journalistic ecosystem needs both the more open modular approach and the more packaged interdependent approach. A couple of other posts looked at the story of the deal itself: Reuters' Felix Salmon examined the decline (and declining value) of the financial scoops beat, and Gawker's Ryan Tate saw Google's manufactured press-release quotes by its business partners as a sign that Google is moving away from the "Don't Be Evil" mantra toward being a tight-fisted corporate giant. — Reading roundup: This week was a pretty packed one. Here's the best of the rest: — This week in AOL: The New York Times' Verne Kopytoff analyzed why the new-look AOL has experienced so many hiccups, and j-prof Dan Kennedy seized on the tidbit in that article that AOL would reportedly be profitable without Patch. — Web philosopher David Weinberger wrote a fantastic piece about the journalistic curiosity and community exchange that's present at Reddit, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram echoed his thoughts. — The Knight Digital Media Center's Joy Mayer has apparently become journalism's "Minister of Engagement," and she's earned the title, publishing a thorough guide to community engagement for newsrooms. — The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles wondered what journalism is worth, and came up with some depressing answers. — Finally, since classes are starting up all over the place in the next week or two, here's 10 great tips for journalism students from Sarah Marshall of Journalism.co.uk, via Twitter.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:49:33 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=866

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 12, 2011.] Murdoch passes Wall Street's test: The fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal continued to spread this week, with the reported arrest of another former News of the World editor and the report that the ostensibly fired News Corp. British chief, Rebekah Brooks, is still on the company payroll. Three weeks after testifying before Parliament, Rupert Murdoch faced Wall Street analysts this week in a conference call, telling them that he's not going anywhere and that the scandal hasn't done any material damage to the company outside of News of the World. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka said Wall Street really doesn't care about the hacking, and Murdoch didn't say much about the few questions he did get on it. Murdoch also had to meet with News Corp.'s board, but as the New York Times' Jeremy Peters reported, the board's officially independent members include numerous people who have deep personal ties to Murdoch. Perhaps more troubling was a different connection among one of the board members: According to Time's Massimo Calabresi, one of them is "best friends" with the district attorney leading the U.S. investigation into the company. The Times' David Carr uncovered more hints at News Corp.'s enormous political influence here in the States, detailing cases of swift approval of a merger by a Justice Department unit led by a future News Corp. executive, as well as a suspiciously dropped federal criminal case. "The company’s size and might give it a soft, less obvious power that it has been able to project to remarkable effect," Carr concluded. At Adweek, Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff went further, reporting that the Justice Department is considering investigating News Corp. on racketeering charges, though Forbes' Jeff Bercovici doubted that would happen. For a bit more info on the situation, here's a good Q&A with Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who's been all over the story. — AOL's slap from investors: This week hasn't been a good one for AOL: After it reported a quarterly loss on Tuesday, its stock dropped by about a quarter by the end of the day. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka gave a quick explainer of why investors are so down on AOL: What little money they're making isn't coming from the all-important display advertising business. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM added more depth to that analysis, arguing that investors are doubting AOL's assurances that its two big gambles — Patch and the acquisition of the Huffington Post — will pay off. According to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (paraphrased by Business Insider), the reason for those problems is that AOL's advertising side hasn't scaled well enough. Peter Kafka explained that AOL's advertising (especially display) is indeed up, though much of that can be attributed to the HuffPo and TechCrunch acquisitions. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici said AOL's public image problem has even damaged the previously successful HuffPo, quoting an analyst who called AOL a "dead brand." Wired's Tim Carmody decided to unite our two big stories this week and suggested that AOL would be a perfect fit for a purchase by News Corp. Meanwhile's AOL's local-news initiative, Patch, launched a Groupon-esque daily deal service, and Iowa grad student Robert Gutsche Jr.questioned Patch's standards for separating journalism and advertising — and got the runaround from Patch when he asked them about it. AOL's new daily tablet magazine, Editions, also drew some criticism, with Fast Company's Austin Carr perturbed that it's not AOL-y enough. — A news org gets into tablets: We've already seen numerous challengers to the iPad's early stranglehold on the tablet marketplace, but the Tribune Co. might be the first news company to try one out. CNN's Mark Milian reported that the newspaper chain is working on an Android-based tablet, which it's planning on offering it for free or very cheap to people who sign up for extended newspaper subscriptions. It's already missed a mid-August deadline for testing the tablet out. Media pundits didn't think much of the Tribune's idea. Wired's Tim Carmody urged the Tribune (and media companies in general) to quit developing tablets, arguing that it's way too hard to do if you're a major development company, let alone a news organization. "If major publishers are seriously prepared to blow up their primary revenue stream — print advertising — and slap together a giveaway tablet in order to save money on ink, God help them," he wrote. Others echoed Carmody's arguments: PaidContent's Tom Crazit called the project "a colossal waste of money for a company trying to emerge from bankruptcy." Chris Velazco of TechCrunch said the cheap-tablet model (also being talked about by Philadelphia Newspapers) isn't viable. Gizmodo's Brent Rose was less restrained: "WHY??" Morris Communications' Steve Yelvington was a little kinder to the Tribune, saying the numbers might add up, but the devil's in the details. — The Times gets experimental: The New York Times has frequently made strong pushes into news innovation over the past several years, and this week it started another one, launching a new public test kitchen for projects in development. The Lab's Megan Garber explained what the site, beta620, is all about, but GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, while applauding the effort, expressed some doubt about whether the Times is really capable of developing a startup's mindset. Tim Carmody of Wired, on the other hand, said the startup analogy isn't the right one for the Times. With these projects, he said, "The New York Times has become an openly experimental public institution. It’s less a cathedral consecrated to its own past than a free museum where patrons are invited to touch and transform everything they see." Poynter's Jeff Sonderman had some suggestions for next steps for the Times to take with beta620: experimenting with design, getting away from the long narrative article, and rethinking comments. — The real-name debate: One long-simmering debate I want to briefly catch you up on: Google+ has decided to take the Facebook route of disallowing pseudonyms, adjusting but reaffirming its policy in the face of online criticism late last month and again on Thursday. The outcry continued, voiced most prominently late last week by social media researcher danah boyd, who asserted that "'real names' policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people." Liz Gannes of All Things Digital said she understands Google's motivations for enforcing real names and unifying everything under its umbrella within the same identity, but the idea of doing the latter is awkward at best and frightening at worst. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, meanwhile, announced he's changed his mind against real-name policies, arguing that requiring real names online is a radical departure from the relationship between speech and identity in the offline world. — Reading roundup: A few other things to keep an eye on this week: — Amazon released a version of its Kindle app for browsers, called the Kindle Cloud Reader. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said the browser-based e-book app (which bypasses Apple's restrictions) could be a roadmap for the future of the web, but Wired's Tim Carmody said it still doesn't get the web. — Google announced it's making its hand-chosen Editors' Picks a standing feature on Google News. The Lab's Megan Garber explained what Google's doing with it. Meanwhile, James Gleick at The New York Review of Books offered a thoughtful piece on Google's domination of our online lives. — Adweek explained an underrated obstacle to innovation and progress in news organizations' online efforts: the intractable CMS. — Steve Buttry, now with the Journal Register Co., gave his lessons from TBD's demise on the Washington local news site's first birthday. It's short but solid. Enjoy.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:36:45 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=858

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 29, 2011.] Debating the Times' paywall and design: In its quarterly earnings call late last week, the New York Times gave the clearest picture yet of how its new online pay plan is working. As usual, it turned out to be something of a Rorschach test: BNET's Erik Sherman called the numbers evidence that the paywall isn't protecting the Times' print subscriptions, as it was intended to. On the other hand, the Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum argued that the Times' big digital subscription figure (224,000) "proves that, contra the naysayers, readers will pay good money for quality news." The Times' paywall adds an important digital revenue stream, he said, while also letting in enough casual readers to keep the value of digital advertising up. The most thorough defense of the Times, though, came from New York magazine's Seth Mnookin: "The Times has taken a do-or-die stand for hard-core, boots-on-the-ground journalism, for earnest civic purpose, for the primacy of content creators over aggregators, and has brought itself back from the precipice."BNET's Jim Edwards said it's premature for Mnookin to say the Times is back, but Reuters' Felix Salmon, a former Times paywall skeptic, agreed with Mnookin that the paywall is working, saying he's glad the Times has shown a porous paywall can work. The other Times-related item is firmly in the hypothetical realm, but it generated at least as much conversation as the real-world pay plan. Last week, web designer Andy Rutledge critiqued the Times' online design and proposed his own version, emphasizing headlines, time stamps, authors, and separating news from opinion. The response wasn't particularly positive. The redesign was generally trashed on Twitter, with a typical sentiment expressed by 10,000 Words' Lauren Rabaino: "It’s hard to take seriously a design that completely ignores the constraints of a typical newspaper." One of the most comprehensive responses came from Guardian developer Martin Belam, who pointed out things like faces, article summaries, and points of social connection that Rutledge was missing. The Lab's Joshua Benton argued that Rutledge's redesign doesn't acknowledge that "the problems of large-scale information architecture for news sites are really hard problems." Meanwhile, Belgian developer Stijn Debrouwere went the other direction, asking for more unrealistic mockups like this one to help us brainstorm what news sites could look like. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said the problem with the Times' site is that it's designed as if readers are interested in everything the paper produces, which is almost never the case. And Paul Scrivens said both Rutledge and the Times should look outside the news industry for design cues. — Google+ growing pains: Google+ continues to grow at a ridiculous pace — far faster than either Facebook or Twitter, as Idealab's Bill Gross pointed out — and as Simon Dumenco of Ad Age argued, the platform represents a social media do-over for a lot of users. It's still generating dissent, though, with much of it stemming from Google+'s policy toward business pages. As Google's Christian Oestlien wrote late last week, the company is working on a business profile template that will be up in the next few months, but they're deleting business pages (including news organization pages) in the meantime. A few companies will get trial pages before they're available to everyone, and others have found workarounds — the tech blog Mashable managed to keep all its followers by simply changing its page name to the name of its CEO, Pete Cashmore. That got other members of the tech press worked up, including Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, who urged Google to restore the deleted pages and let businesses create pages normally. TechCrunch's MG Siegler said Google is essentially creating its own version of Twitter's Suggested User List, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM made the case for why this is a big deal. Elsewhere in the world of Google+, Mathew Ingram wrote about the issues it's dealing with regarding anonymity, and the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal is experimenting with a daily news roundup on his personal page there. The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined Google+'s usefulness as a news tool, concluding that while it has potential, it needs a bigger, broader user base to start to really challenge Twitter and Facebook. — The end of media moguls?: The News Corp. phone hacking scandal shifted down a gear this week, but there were still a few developments to report. The News of the World hacking victims also reportedly included the mother of an 8-year-old murder victim, and two former employees testified that they had told James Murdoch that the hacking was widespread, contradicting what Murdoch had told Parliament last week. Other News Corp. veterans challenged the picture Rupert Murdoch painted of himself as a largely hands-off newspaper boss. The New York Times' David Carr wrote that James Murdoch is done, and that Rupert has finally been revealed as vulnerable. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis was more emphatic, calling Murdoch the last media mogul: "The mogul is extinct. The kind of big media institution he built will follow him. Lovely chaos will follow. It’s called democracy." The Washington Post's Erik Wemple took a quick look at what a post-Murdoch world might look like. A couple of other News Corp.-related avenues to chase down: Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review argued that a scandal like News of the World's won't happen in the U.S., and News Corp.'s newest property, the tablet publication The Daily, appears to be floundering, according to a New York Observer feature, though a new version was released last week. — Reading roundup: There wasn't a whole lot to take in this week, but here's a quick sampling: — The FCC is releasing a series of studies on media ownership, one of the newest of which suggested that media cross-ownership (ownership of multiple media outlets within a single market) doesn't hurt local news, and may actually help it. — Wisconsin j-prof Stephen Ward made a thoughtful case for redefining objectivity in the digital age. — Particularly for the Twitter skeptics and writing teachers out there, Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore put together a great post outlining the ways Twitter has made her a better writer. — Finally, I've been trying to cover this piecemeal discussion here, but the AP's Jonathan Stray did a much better job of summarizing the recent conversation about the changing structure of news stories with a fantastic reading list. Now that you're done with this link-fest, be sure to give that one a look-through, too.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 11, 2011.] Google+ courts businesses: After banning businesses for its first four months, Google+ finally let them in this week, launching Google+ Pages, which gives accounts to business and groups. (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land put together the best walkthrough of what Pages are and how they work.) Businesses jumped right in, including, of course, news orgs: Breaking News put together a running list of news Pages, and one Fox News show announced it would do Hangouts with presidential candidates, starting with Mitt Romney next week. As Business Insider explained, Google has a big carrot to draw businesses in: Direct Connect, which allows users to go directly to a business's Google+ Page if they the business's name preceded by a "+". Lost Remote's Cory Bergman (who also runs the Breaking News Google+ account) said businesses should also get some SEO mojo from users clicking +1 on their Google+ account, which he argued was enough of a payoff to justify maintaining a Google+ account — at least for now, anyway. Social media guru Robert Scoble, on the other hand, was disappointed in Pages, calling them clumsy and difficult to manage. Fast Company's Mark Wilson brought up the same point and added that since Google gives individuals two options of how to engage with businesses instead of Facebook's single "Like," most people will choose the weaker option. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid wondered what exactly that weaker option, giving the business a +1, will do. For Slate's Farhad Manjoo, the addition of Pages was too little, too late for Google+. He declared the social network dead, a victim of Google's launch-then-fix-it model that has worked so well for most of its products. "But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place," Manjoo wrote, arguing that Google should have let its users be more free to experiment to make up for its initial deficits. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and the New York Times' Nick Bilton countered that it's too soon to give up on the network, because Google+ is designed to be not just another social network, but instead the connective tissue integrating an entire way to experience the web. Google has some pretty good cards still its hand that can help it reach that goal, too, he said. — Romenesko, attribution, and hair-splitting: Jim Romenesko, the dean of media bloggers soon to semi-retire from the Poynter Institute, was pushed into a bizarre little controversy yesterday when his editor, Julie Moos, wrote a post taking him to task for "incomplete attribution" in his posts — essentially, using language from the posts he's summarizing (and linking to) without putting it in quote marks. Moos wrote the post in response to questions from the Columbia Journalism Review as it develops an article on the subject. Romenesko wasn't asked to resign (he offered his resignation twice but Moos rejected it), but he will have to follow stricter attribution guidelines and have his posts edited before they go up. 10,000 Words' Elena Zak praised Poynter's transparency, but to most observers, this was ethical hairsplitting run amok. Media consultant Mark Potts hit many of the main points in his defense of Romenesko, noting that no one has complained to Poynter about this in the decade he's been blogging for them. Reuters' Felix Salmon pointed to Romenesko's stature in the blogosphere and his role in establishing the field's norms: "If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines." The Awl's Choire Sicha took the opportunity to level a more serious charge at Poynter's handling of Romenesko's blog, saying that "Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost 'engagement'" and other online-media buzzwords. For his part, Romenesko himself expressed his frustration in typically understated fashion in an email to the New York Times, then tweeted that "I feel it's time to go." — Is future-of-news talk hurting journalism?: This week, we got the rare opportunity to have a substantive, big-picture (meta)discussion about the way we think about the future of news when the Columbia Journalism Review published a thorough critique by Dean Starkman of 'future of news' thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen. The piece is quite long, but worth a close read: In short, Starkman argued that these thinkers are undermining the most valuable form of journalism — public-service journalism — by disempowering journalists and their institutions and by wasting their limited time (and the public's) with endless, mostly useless experimentation and busywork. Instead, Starkman proposed a model built around maintaining journalism's most valued institutions, arguing that "journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself." Several people objected to Starkman's argument, starting with media strategist Terry Heaton, who countered that it's not institutions the future-of-news people have a problem with, but hierarchical institutions, and former Wall Street Journal writer Jason Fry, who said that some forms of news are indeed a commodity. A few others, like Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and Steve Buttry of the Journal Register Co. argued that deep reporting vs. new media mastery isn't an either/or proposition, pointing to examples of news organizations like the Guardian who do both well. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell also wrote about her old paper's efforts in making a similar point, arguing that the spirit of muckraking is being carried on in these digital, networked initiatives. "The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting. It should be at the heart of it. And if it is not, then the institutions that Starkman laments might be to blame," she wrote. Starkman responded by arguing that it all boils down to stories, but the future-of-news folks want to talk about something else, and here at the Lab, C.W. Anderson weighed in on with a smart post on the ways in which institutions can be forces for both good and ill. — A force for digital change in the newsroom: The New York Times announced this week the retirement (effective the end of the year) of one of the pioneers of news on the web — Martin Nisenholtz, a senior vice president at the paper. As the Times noted, Nisenholtz has been intimately involved in just about every major technological initiative the Times has undertaken since he came on board in 1995: Launching the website, moving it into mobile media and tablets, and instituting its paywall earlier this year. Poynter's Julie Moos put together a greatest-hits of commentary by and about Nisenholtz over the years, including his prediction in early 2004 that smart phones would be a particularly influential force in changing news delivery. PaidContent's Staci Kramer talked about his lasting impact: No matter how slow (or fast) the transition seemed, "the NYT has an integrated newsroom with an understanding that digital, while it may not always be first, is equal." Dave Winer, who helped create RSS, pointed out that Nisenholtz made the Times the first major publisher to license its stories for RSS, making a significant contribution to the growth of the open web in the process. The Lab's Joshua Benton used that story to illustrate thateven if news orgs can't invent these transformative web tools, they can still play a big role in their evolution and adoption. Media prof C.W. Anderson also noted another contribution Nisenholtz made — by allowing a scholar access to study his paper's digital efforts, he helped revitalize the field of digital media sociology. — A neutral way to tweet: If a few of the most recent sets of social media guidelines are any indication, news organizations are really struggling with the concept of their journalists' retweets on Twitter. Several of those organizations have asked journalists not to retweet opinionated content without comment, lest they be thought of as biased themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman tried to resolve that problem with an idea for an NT, or neutral tweet, which people could use to retweet something while declaring their neutrality about it. Most journalism folks on Twitter didn't like the idea, as Sonderman himself showed in his fine roundup of reaction. Many of them saw it as a way to avoid interacting naturally on Twitter, a "pacifier" or "high tech milquetoast," in the words of j-profs Jay Rosen and Matt Waite. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram expanded on the idea, calling it a solution to the wrong problem. "By pretending that their journalists don’t have opinions, when everyone knows that they do, mainstream media outlets are suggesting their viewers or readers are too stupid to figure out where the truth lies," he wrote. — Reading roundup: Lots of smaller stories and discussions popping in and out of the future-of-news world this week. Here's a few of them: — This week in News Corp. scandal: Rupert Murdoch's son, James, told British Parliament he didn't mislead them last time he talked to them. Or, as Gawker put it, he asserted that everyone's a liar except him. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade doesn't believe him. Murdoch also said the company might still close its British newspaper, the Sun. And we also found out News of the World hired people to spy on their hacking victims' lawyers. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger put the scandal in perspective in a lecture. — New York Times media critic David Carr mused on the decline of WikiLeaks as an organization and its implications for radical transparency as a movement. Dave Winer and Mathew Ingram responded by questioning why the Times hasn't supported WikiLeaks more itself. — Andy Rooney of CBS' 60 Minutes, one of the icons of American broadcast television, died late last week at age 92. You can check out the obituaries from CBS and the New York Times, a set of his classic essays at Gawker, and a thoughtful remembrance by tech entrepreneur Anil Dash. — Finally, two great pieces of advice for two groups of people: Longtime News & Record editor John Robinson for newspaper editors, and MIT's Ethan Zuckerman for media consumers (read: all of us).]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com 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-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-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/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:16:35 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=886

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 2, 2011.] Hurricane news' innovation and hype: The big U.S. news story this week was Hurricane Irene, which hit the East Coast and New England last weekend. It was a story that hit particularly close to home for many of the U.S.' leading news organizations, which led to some innovative journalism, but also some questionable coverage, too. Several news organizations temporarily took down their online paywalls during the storm, led by the New York Times and the Long Island newspaper Newsday. The Times also used the storm as an opportunity to introduce a new Twitter account devoted to curation of information on Twitter by the paper's editors. The Lab's Megan Garber noted that the account is incorporating much more conversation than the Times' other official Twitter accounts, and Jeff Sonderman of Poynter talked to the Times about its goal with the account — to provide a space for faster, more unrestrained information from the Times on Twitter. Another good example of storm-related news innovation: The Journal Register Co.'s Ben Franklin Project. Irene was also a big occasion for TV news, which trotted out the usual round-the-clock coverage and on-location weather-defying reports. After the storm passed through, many questioned whether news organizations had gone over the top in their breathless coverage of Irene. The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz accused cable news of being "utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon," and at the Boston Herald, Michael Graham called the Irene coverage "a manufactured media product with a tenuous connection to the actual news." Others (many outside the TV news industry) pushed back against those charges: Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy said that the storm's damage actually largely matched the coverage; it just seemed like it fizzled out because that damage wasn't near New York or Washington. The New York Times' Nate Silver took a more scientific approach and made a similar conclusion, showing that the amount of Irene coverage was generally in line with that of previous storms, when the level of damage was factored in. Poynter's Julie Moos, who put together a great summary of the hurricane hype debate, also argued that Irene's severity matched the level of coverage, providing along the way a useful six-part measuring stick for journalistic hype. "The perception of hype is fed by the gap between supply and demand," she said. "Journalists must make more closely calibrated decisions than ever about what information to provide." — Social network as identity service: Google CEO Eric Schmidt threw some more fuel onto the slow-burning argument over Google+ and real names when he said at a conference last weekend that the new social network is essentially an "identity service with a link structure around your friends" — a way for others on the Internet to verify your identity and communicate with you under that identity. Asked about the risks to some people of such a hard-and-fast online identity, Schmidt replied that, well, they don't have to use Google+ then. It was quite a telling quote regarding Google+'s true purpose — one that several commentators seized on. Mashable's Pete Cashmore described the battle between Google and Facebook over web identity and reasoned that the reason Google is taking a hard line on real names is that it needs its identity system to be more reliable than Facebook's. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson said now we officially know who the real-names policy is really for: Google, not us. "The answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to," he said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram used the statement to tie together his description of what's at stake in the identity competition — the more accurate and detailed identities are, the more advertisers will pay for them. Tech blogger Dave Winer was more blunt: Google+ is a bank, he said. They need people's real names because they want to move money around, like any other business. At the Guardian, tech writer Cory Doctorow argued that we need to open up this discussion about online identity, and that the single-identity philosophy Google's espousing isn't in our best interests. Meanwhile, this month's Carnival of Journalism blog ring wrote about Google+, with several writers urging journalists and academics to "just use it," as the University of Colorado's Steve Outing put it. Spot.Us' David Cohn put the rationale well: "The reason to be on Google+ isn’t because it’s the newest, hottest, sexiest thing. ... You should be on these sites to understand how people are communicating and the vocabulary of this communication." — CNN grabs Zite: Major news organizations have been itching to jump into the increasingly crowded market for tablet-based news readers, and this week CNN made its own play, snatching up Zite, the personalized, magazine-like iPad news app launched in March. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher put the purchase price between million and million and explained the simple reason for CNN's interest: They're trying to acquire the technology to keep up with audiences that are quickly moving onto mobile platforms for their news. Zite will continue to operate as a separate unit, across the country from CNN's headquarters. According to mocoNews' Tom Krazit, CNN will help Zite scale up to a bigger audience, while Zite will work to improve CNN's mobile offerings. And when asked by Mashable's Lauren Indvik about adding ads, CNN execs said they're going to build up the product first and worry about the business model later. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said Zite can help CNN learn what people are sharing, why, and how they want news presented in a mobile format. — WikiLeaks' inadvertent cable release: This week marked what looks like the beginning of a new, bizarre confusing chapter in the WikiLeaks saga. The story's been a bit of a confusing story, but I'll try to break it down for you: Ever since last November, WikiLeaks has been gradually releasing documents from its collection of diplomatic cables. But over the past couple of weeks, the full archive of 251,000 cables was inadvertently released online, without sensitive information redacted, as WikiLeaks had been doing. WikiLeaks blamed the Guardian, the British newspaper with which it had been working, for publishing the password to the hidden document files in a book about WikiLeaks earlier this year. The Guardian responded that it was told when it was given the password that it was temporary, to be changed within a day. In the meantime, as Der Spiegel explained well, Daniel Domscheit-Berg had defected from WikiLeaks with the server that contained the files, and other WikiLeaks supporters spread the files around to keep them from being taken off the web. Once the password leaked out, the contents of the files gradually started spilling online, and by Wednesday night, they were completely public, according to Der Spiegel. It's not entirely clear what WikiLeaks will do with the files now, but that's where the conflict stands. — FT pulls out of the App Store: Back in June, the Financial Times became the first major news organization to develop an HTML5 app for Apple's App Store, allowing it to design a single app for multiple platforms and to handle subscriptions outside of the app itself, which gave it a way around Apple's 30% cut. FT removed the app from the App Store this week instead of complying with Apple's requirement that all subscriptions be handled within apps. As paidContent's Robert Andrews explained, FT can still make money off of existing iPad app users, but the paper says most of its users have switched over the web app, and its web app use is growing quickly enough that this isn't a big loss anyway. As GigaOM's Darrell Etherington pointed out, this could be an important test case in whether a news organization can replace its Apple-based app business with an HTML5-based web app. — A new generation of campaign reporters: We're starting to hurtle toward full-on presidential campaign season in the U.S., and according to the New York Times, many of the reporters who'll be covering it are 20-somethings, mere babes in the dark, scary woods of campaign journalism. The Times did a trend story on these young reporters, focusing on a boot camp for them put on by CBS and National Journal. Among the advice they're getting: Be careful to slip up in public view, and don't break news on Twitter. Mocking, of course, ensued. Village Voice's Rosie Gray said CBS and National Journal are asking to get beat on big stories with their Twitter policy, and Alex Pareene of Salon said the moral of the story is that modern campaign journalism is so inane that it can be pushed off to barely experienced reporters without anyone being the wiser. The Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry had perhaps the most substantive concern: Why are these reporters being taught primarily about avoiding gaffes, rather than actually doing good journalism? — Reading roundup: Here's the rest of what happened in this crazy-busy news week: — The New York Times' public editor, Arthur Brisbane, wrote a column criticizing the Times' popular DealBook site for missing large-scale economic issues in favor of small, incremental daily stories. Times business editor Larry Ingrassia fired back with a defense of DealBook, and Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon also defended DealBook, saying Brisbane was making a false either-or distinction, among other errors. — A few more reflections and analyses of Steve Jobs' impending departure as Apple CEO, announced last week: The New York Times' David Carr on what he changed, and Wired's John C. Abell on Jobs' legacy and Tim Carmody on Jobs and the arts. — He's made the point before in different ways, but NYU j-prof Jay Rosen's analysis of why the system of political news coverage is broken is still worth a read. He also followed it up with a rethinking of what political journalism could be. — Finally, NPR's Matt Thompson wrote a great piece on what journalists can learn from the scientific method, tying together some useful big ideas.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-the-great-hurricane-hype-debate-and-google-as-an-%e2%80%98identity-service%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:09:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=884

This Week in Review: Remembering Steve Jobs, and a new-old media partnership

This Week in Review: TBD gets the axe, deciphering Apple’s new rules, and empowering more news sources

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 26, 2011.] Apple begins life after Jobs: This week in the media and tech world was defined by three men's departures, all announced on Wednesday. By far the biggest was Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple, 35 years after he founded the company. The decision was largely health-driven, as Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and has been on medical leave since January. Jobs will continue to be Apple's chairman, and as the Wall Street Journal reported, he'll still be involved in product development. The announcement has drawn a massive amount of commentary, and Techmeme is the best place to gorge yourself on it — or you can read Adam Penenberg's mashup. Here's a small selection of some of the most interesting stuff, starting with the reflections on Jobs' legacy: All Things Digital's Walt Mossberg put together a sharp little rundown of the ways Jobs has changed the computing, animation, music, and mobile media industries. (TV is next.) Tech blogger John Gruber marveled at the company Jobs has built, saying, "Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself." Om Malik of GigaOM said Jobs taught us that building the future requires taking the long view, and tech guru Robert Scoble praised Jobs as a CEO who genuinely cared about his products, not just profits. If you're looking for more on Jobs himself, Byliner highlighted seven definitive profiles of the man from the past 15 years. Jobs' successor is Tim Cook, an Alabaman who joined Apple in 1998 and has been the company's chief operating officer since 2007. Cook has served as interim CEO twice, and he's essentially been acting as CEO throughout Jobs' medical leave this year. Reuters profiled Cook, and All Things Digital's John Paczkowski said that while he's not going to be the visionary leader that Jobs was, he's the steady hand that Apple needs right now. The Atlantic's Nicholas Jackson said that Cook has learned to emulate Jobs as well as anyone could and noted all of the successful launches he's presided over. Wired's Tim Carmody wrote the most thorough defense of Cook as Jobs' successor, detailing his history with the company and his logistics innovations in particular. The consensus on the Jobs-to-Cook transition seemed to be that Apple is losing a uniquely influential, irreplaceable CEO, but that the company is strong enough to stay well ahead of its competition anyway. Business Insider's Matt Rosoff cataloged what Apple will lose with Jobs, and msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman took stock of where Apple stands as Jobs leaving, suggesting that it might need to start working harder to fight for market share. Slate's Farhad Manjoo argued that Jobs has set his company up perfectly to continue his success, and Reuters' Felix Salmon predicted this transition will go down as a textbook example of a well-executed succession plan. Cook, for his part, assured Apple employees that the company's not going to change. — Two media legends leave their posts: The other two men to depart were in the media world: Poynter's pioneering media blogger Jim Romenesko and Slate media critic Jack Shafer. Romenesko, who's been running the definitive blog for news on the journalism business since the late '90s, will be semi-retiring in January, occasionally contributing reported media pieces to Poynter and doing some writing on a new personal site. The Huffington Post's Michael Arrington broke the news, and Romenesko's editor, Julie Moos, explained it from Poynter's perspective, detailing their ongoing transition of Romenesko to a group blog. Poynter's Bill Mitchell told the story of Romenesko's tenure at Poynter, and touched on some of the enormous influence he's had: He chronicled one of the most important eras in journalism, helped aggregation be seen as a journalistic craft, and "brought transparency to newsrooms, equipping readers and staffers alike to hold those organizations accountable in the way that they scrutinize the operations of others." The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder also reflected on Romenesko's impact, and others chimed in on Twitter: Rare Planet's Patrick Thornton said he "showed journalists that good curation is journalism," and the New York Times' Brian Stelter (who founded TVNewser) and paidContent founder Rafat Ali said he inspired them to start their sites. And while Wired's Tim Carmody called him "Twitter before Twitter," Romenesko himself told the New York Times he found himself disoriented by the rise of social media, saying, "My role kind of vanished." Shafer was one of four laid off from Slate, where he had written about media since 1996, the year the site was founded. Just hours before the news came down, the American Journalism Review had posted a profile of Shafer, with several luminaries praising his fearlessness and his meticulous research and reporting. The layoff spurred a lot of confusion and complaints on Twitter and elsewhere, led by AJR's Rem Rieder, who called the decision "befuddling and disappointing." Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy also questioned the move, calling Shafer a "dogged reporter in a field where too many media critics would prefer to sit back and pontificate" and praising his iconoclastic perspective in an environment dominated by lockstep liberals and conservatives. Media critic Erik Wemple of the Washington Post said the layoffs weren't so preposterous given the financial struggles of Slate's owner, the Washington Post Co., but Forbes' Jeff Bercovici wondered if Slate's general-interest approach to the web still makes sense. Hamilton Nolan of Gawker used the occasion to opine on the decline of the media critic. Shafer, meanwhile, talked to Adweek about how he approached his job and what's next for him. — What should online identity be?: As Google+ grows, it's also drawing its share of detractors in the tech world, with various gripes about the new social network. Tech guru Robert Scoble, one of Google+'s heaviest users, also said it won't be ready to go beyond the tech crowd until it finds a way to cut down on the noise. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram echoed that thought and added a complaint about the difficulty of finding new users to connect with. Others are pushing back against that: The Huffington Post's Craig Kannalley said Google+ has all the building blocks of a successful platform, and MySpace founder Tom Anderson said you'll eventually be using it. One of the primary complaints about Google+ since its launch has been its real-names policy, and Mathew Ingram continued to beat that drum this week, saying that Google lacks transparency about its motives, suggesting that Google allow any pseudonym users desire but also offer verified identities for users that request it. Web editing veteran Derek Powazek defended Google, arguing that the notion that no one on the web uses their real name is dead: "Outside of a few legitimate edge cases and the occasional sci-fi fantasy, who we are online is simply who we are." Even though there's still a need for a space for anonymous speech online, he said, it's not up to corporations like Google to provide it for us. The discussion about real names also extended again into the area of comment sections this week, with Time's Graeme McMillan arguing that Facebook comments make those sections more civil, and the Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins noting that Facebook comments don't necessarily solve the anonymity problem. Echo's Chris Saad said real names aren't the real issue with comment sections for media companies, and an Ad Age survey found that most online readers don't care about comments. — Integrating new media into journalism training: A note from across the pond: In a survey released this week, members of Britain's National Council for the Training of Journalists cast an emphatic vote for traditional media skills over new media expertise when it comes to the group's prestigious National Certification Examination. (The exam is used as a qualification for newsroom positions, and helps determine pay in some cases.) Those results upset a number of British journalists who saw them as evidence of a technology-averse media establishment. The Guardian's Martin Belam worried that today's young journalists are being "encouraged to pay for qualifications that will equip them to work in a 90s newsroom, because the people designing the courses and the industry input they receive are all from people who cut their teeth in a 90s newsroom." J-prof Andy Dickinson called the group's desires journalism training for the common denominator, not the future. Numerous other journalists — Wales Online's Alison Gow, Reed Business Information's Adam Tinworth, David Higgerson of Trinity Mirror, and American Kerry Northrup — made a similar point: It's a fallacy, they said, to think of social media, multimedia and web proficiency as separate skills from the classic skills of reporting and storytelling — they're just other platforms on which to apply those skills. — Reading roundup: Really, there was other stuff going on this week than important people leaving their jobs. Here's a taste: — A site called The Daily Dot launched this week with the goal of being "the web's community newspaper." So what does that mean? It's trying to cover the web's social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube with reporting like a small-town paper might do. Adweek, Mashable, and VentureBeat have features on it, and one of its founders, Nicholas White, gave some lessons from his experience. — The long-hated rule known as the Fairness Doctrine was officially taken off the books by the U.S. Federal Communications Communication this week. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum said goodbye. — A few News Corp. notes: The (News Corp.-owned) Wall Street Journal looked at how the plans to tap the phone of a 13-year-old murder victim went awry at News of the World, the Daily Beast's Brian Cathcart focused on the investigator at the center of that scandal, and the Los Angeles Times' Joe Flint looked at News Corp.'s influence-peddling game here in the U.S. — Two posts to leave you with: Maria Popova's fantastic post here at the Lab on the new rarity in the information abundance of the web, and some more great advice for journalism students from the Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-departures-for-jobs-and-two-media-mainstays-and-working-with-real-name-rules/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 01:59:18 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=882

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 19, 2011.] Is social media killing big ideas?: In the New York Times this week, USC fellow Neal Gabler put forward a different form of the familiar "information overload" complaint, this time tying the proliferation of social media to the paucity of big ideas. We don't spend time thinking about and valuing big ideas, he argued, because we're too busy trying to process — and add to — the flood of information coming at us through social media. You can't think and tweet at the same time, Gabler said, because tweeting "is a form of distraction or anti-thinking." Naturally, this didn't go over particularly well among the online media punditry. Several people countered that one of Twitter's functions is to direct users to big ideas, to point outside of its 140-character limits through hyperlinks. Media prof Chuck Tryon, author Stephen Baker, and Techdirt's Mike Masnick all made that argument, with Masnick summing it up well: "While social media may not have enlarged Gabler's intellectual universe, it has massively enlarged mine. Thanks to Twitter specifically, I've been able to meet tons of fascinatingly smart people I never would have met otherwise." The trick, as Baker said, is to "listen to the right people, and then follow their links." Two other writers made particularly smart points: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones noted that where before we knew exactly where to find big ideas and how to discuss them, we're now in the middle of a massive media transition. That doesn't mean the big idea is dead, he said, it means it's headed somewhere new, and we don't know exactly where yet. And the Lab's Megan Garber pointed out that Gabler's vision of big ideas is closely tied to big media, but argued that those big ideas don't need big media to thrive. Instead, she said, "Increasingly, though, the ideas that spark progress are collective, diffusive endeavors rather than the result (to the extent they ever were) of individual inspiration." — A paywall plan that understands online readers?: Reuters blogger Felix Salmon is already on record as a supporter of the New York Times' five-month-old paywall, and this week he detailed exactly why he thinks it's so effective. Salmon likened the Times' metered model, with all of its leeway and potential workarounds, to a polite "Please keep off the grass" sign. He argued that contra the prevailing philosophy that readers won't pay for something they can get for free, the Times is betting that "the pleasure of reading its content will be enough to persuade a large number of people to pay. It’s a far more attractive model, and one which is much more likely to attract new young subscribers over the long term." In a follow-up post, Salmon explained why the Times' model is fundamentally different from the Financial Times' pay meter — it's not trying nearly as hard to keep non-subscribers away from its content. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman agreed with Salmon's premise: Wilson praised the efficacy of getting paid after the fact rather than before, and Sonderman said the Times has discovered that convenience, duty, and appreciation are more compelling motivations than coercion. There was one notable dissenter: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, who took issue with the idea that the Times' plan has been successful, arguing instead that it's not growing the paper's online audience, but setting up digital sandbags to protect a declining print product. The plan "has virtually nothing to do with actually taking advantage of the digital world in any concrete way," Ingram wrote. "It’s just charging people nickels and dimes for their paper, the way the NYT and other newspapers have for a century and a half or so." — News Corp.'s problems continue to grow: The damning information against News Corp. in the phone-hacking scandal at its former News of the World newspaper keeps on coming. This week, it was a four-year-old letter written by Clive Goodman, a reporter at the center of the scandal. In it, Goodman said that the hacking was discussed regularly at the paper and suggested that knowledge of it ran much deeper than News Corp. has been insisting. Notably, News Corp. had submitted the letter to Parliament but redacted the incriminating parts. With the new revelation, Slate's Jack Shafer wrote that "the scandal has grown too large for one or two willing Murdoch lieutenants or employees to stanch it by taking the fall." That impression has led many watchers to wonder, as the Guardian's Brian Cathcart did, if James Murdoch, Rupert's son, may be forced to resign. James responded late last week to Parliament's questions about his truthfulness in his testimony to them last month, and News Corp. is reportedly making plans in case he decides to step aside. The bad news continues to pile up elsewhere in News Corp., too. The private investigator at the center of the scandal sued News International (the company's British newspaper division) for not paying his legal bills, and officially acknowledged in its annual report that the scandal could impair its business, and that it doesn't know how much money it'll end up costing. Two more commentators — the New Yorker's Ken Auletta and Reuters' David Callahan — echoed a popular sentiment lately, saying the responsibility for this whole ordeal lies directly with Rupert Murdoch. — Google grabs a mobile-phone producer: For the tech geeks among us, Google made some big news this week, buying Motorola Mobility, Motorola's mobile devices division, for .5 billion. According to the New York Times, the deal had a lot to do with stockpiling patents in order to defend its Android mobile operating system from patent lawsuits. It also may allow Google to drive down development costs for the all-important smartphone and tablet markets. Cory Bergman of Lost Remote noted that this move isn't just about mobile, though — it also represents Google's biggest move into TV yet. With Motorola's significant share of the cable-TV hardware business, Bergman said, Google now has the opportunity to seamlessly integrate its technology with TVs across the world. Here at the Lab, Joshua Benton used the acquisition as an example of the tension between a Windows-style modular approach to business, with products that can be swapped in and out, and an Apple-esque interdependent one, with a set of interlinking, proprietary products. He also applied the idea to news, saying our journalistic ecosystem needs both the more open modular approach and the more packaged interdependent approach. A couple of other posts looked at the story of the deal itself: Reuters' Felix Salmon examined the decline (and declining value) of the financial scoops beat, and Gawker's Ryan Tate saw Google's manufactured press-release quotes by its business partners as a sign that Google is moving away from the "Don't Be Evil" mantra toward being a tight-fisted corporate giant. — Reading roundup: This week was a pretty packed one. Here's the best of the rest: — This week in AOL: The New York Times' Verne Kopytoff analyzed why the new-look AOL has experienced so many hiccups, and j-prof Dan Kennedy seized on the tidbit in that article that AOL would reportedly be profitable without Patch. — Web philosopher David Weinberger wrote a fantastic piece about the journalistic curiosity and community exchange that's present at Reddit, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram echoed his thoughts. — The Knight Digital Media Center's Joy Mayer has apparently become journalism's "Minister of Engagement," and she's earned the title, publishing a thorough guide to community engagement for newsrooms. — The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles wondered what journalism is worth, and came up with some depressing answers. — Finally, since classes are starting up all over the place in the next week or two, here's 10 great tips for journalism students from Sarah Marshall of Journalism.co.uk, via Twitter.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-twitter-and-big-ideas-praise-for-the-nyt%e2%80%99s-pay-plan-and-more-trouble-for-murdoch/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:49:33 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=866

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 12, 2011.] Murdoch passes Wall Street's test: The fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal continued to spread this week, with the reported arrest of another former News of the World editor and the report that the ostensibly fired News Corp. British chief, Rebekah Brooks, is still on the company payroll. Three weeks after testifying before Parliament, Rupert Murdoch faced Wall Street analysts this week in a conference call, telling them that he's not going anywhere and that the scandal hasn't done any material damage to the company outside of News of the World. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka said Wall Street really doesn't care about the hacking, and Murdoch didn't say much about the few questions he did get on it. Murdoch also had to meet with News Corp.'s board, but as the New York Times' Jeremy Peters reported, the board's officially independent members include numerous people who have deep personal ties to Murdoch. Perhaps more troubling was a different connection among one of the board members: According to Time's Massimo Calabresi, one of them is "best friends" with the district attorney leading the U.S. investigation into the company. The Times' David Carr uncovered more hints at News Corp.'s enormous political influence here in the States, detailing cases of swift approval of a merger by a Justice Department unit led by a future News Corp. executive, as well as a suspiciously dropped federal criminal case. "The company’s size and might give it a soft, less obvious power that it has been able to project to remarkable effect," Carr concluded. At Adweek, Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff went further, reporting that the Justice Department is considering investigating News Corp. on racketeering charges, though Forbes' Jeff Bercovici doubted that would happen. For a bit more info on the situation, here's a good Q&A with Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who's been all over the story. — AOL's slap from investors: This week hasn't been a good one for AOL: After it reported a quarterly loss on Tuesday, its stock dropped by about a quarter by the end of the day. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka gave a quick explainer of why investors are so down on AOL: What little money they're making isn't coming from the all-important display advertising business. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM added more depth to that analysis, arguing that investors are doubting AOL's assurances that its two big gambles — Patch and the acquisition of the Huffington Post — will pay off. According to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (paraphrased by Business Insider), the reason for those problems is that AOL's advertising side hasn't scaled well enough. Peter Kafka explained that AOL's advertising (especially display) is indeed up, though much of that can be attributed to the HuffPo and TechCrunch acquisitions. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici said AOL's public image problem has even damaged the previously successful HuffPo, quoting an analyst who called AOL a "dead brand." Wired's Tim Carmody decided to unite our two big stories this week and suggested that AOL would be a perfect fit for a purchase by News Corp. Meanwhile's AOL's local-news initiative, Patch, launched a Groupon-esque daily deal service, and Iowa grad student Robert Gutsche Jr.questioned Patch's standards for separating journalism and advertising — and got the runaround from Patch when he asked them about it. AOL's new daily tablet magazine, Editions, also drew some criticism, with Fast Company's Austin Carr perturbed that it's not AOL-y enough. — A news org gets into tablets: We've already seen numerous challengers to the iPad's early stranglehold on the tablet marketplace, but the Tribune Co. might be the first news company to try one out. CNN's Mark Milian reported that the newspaper chain is working on an Android-based tablet, which it's planning on offering it for free or very cheap to people who sign up for extended newspaper subscriptions. It's already missed a mid-August deadline for testing the tablet out. Media pundits didn't think much of the Tribune's idea. Wired's Tim Carmody urged the Tribune (and media companies in general) to quit developing tablets, arguing that it's way too hard to do if you're a major development company, let alone a news organization. "If major publishers are seriously prepared to blow up their primary revenue stream — print advertising — and slap together a giveaway tablet in order to save money on ink, God help them," he wrote. Others echoed Carmody's arguments: PaidContent's Tom Crazit called the project "a colossal waste of money for a company trying to emerge from bankruptcy." Chris Velazco of TechCrunch said the cheap-tablet model (also being talked about by Philadelphia Newspapers) isn't viable. Gizmodo's Brent Rose was less restrained: "WHY??" Morris Communications' Steve Yelvington was a little kinder to the Tribune, saying the numbers might add up, but the devil's in the details. — The Times gets experimental: The New York Times has frequently made strong pushes into news innovation over the past several years, and this week it started another one, launching a new public test kitchen for projects in development. The Lab's Megan Garber explained what the site, beta620, is all about, but GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, while applauding the effort, expressed some doubt about whether the Times is really capable of developing a startup's mindset. Tim Carmody of Wired, on the other hand, said the startup analogy isn't the right one for the Times. With these projects, he said, "The New York Times has become an openly experimental public institution. It’s less a cathedral consecrated to its own past than a free museum where patrons are invited to touch and transform everything they see." Poynter's Jeff Sonderman had some suggestions for next steps for the Times to take with beta620: experimenting with design, getting away from the long narrative article, and rethinking comments. — The real-name debate: One long-simmering debate I want to briefly catch you up on: Google+ has decided to take the Facebook route of disallowing pseudonyms, adjusting but reaffirming its policy in the face of online criticism late last month and again on Thursday. The outcry continued, voiced most prominently late last week by social media researcher danah boyd, who asserted that "'real names' policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people." Liz Gannes of All Things Digital said she understands Google's motivations for enforcing real names and unifying everything under its umbrella within the same identity, but the idea of doing the latter is awkward at best and frightening at worst. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, meanwhile, announced he's changed his mind against real-name policies, arguing that requiring real names online is a radical departure from the relationship between speech and identity in the offline world. — Reading roundup: A few other things to keep an eye on this week: — Amazon released a version of its Kindle app for browsers, called the Kindle Cloud Reader. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said the browser-based e-book app (which bypasses Apple's restrictions) could be a roadmap for the future of the web, but Wired's Tim Carmody said it still doesn't get the web. — Google announced it's making its hand-chosen Editors' Picks a standing feature on Google News. The Lab's Megan Garber explained what Google's doing with it. Meanwhile, James Gleick at The New York Review of Books offered a thoughtful piece on Google's domination of our online lives. — Adweek explained an underrated obstacle to innovation and progress in news organizations' online efforts: the intractable CMS. — Steve Buttry, now with the Journal Register Co., gave his lessons from TBD's demise on the Washington local news site's first birthday. It's short but solid. Enjoy.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdoch-and-wall-street-aol-takes-a-dive-and-tribune-takes-a-stab-at-tablets/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:36:45 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=858

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 29, 2011.] Debating the Times' paywall and design: In its quarterly earnings call late last week, the New York Times gave the clearest picture yet of how its new online pay plan is working. As usual, it turned out to be something of a Rorschach test: BNET's Erik Sherman called the numbers evidence that the paywall isn't protecting the Times' print subscriptions, as it was intended to. On the other hand, the Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum argued that the Times' big digital subscription figure (224,000) "proves that, contra the naysayers, readers will pay good money for quality news." The Times' paywall adds an important digital revenue stream, he said, while also letting in enough casual readers to keep the value of digital advertising up. The most thorough defense of the Times, though, came from New York magazine's Seth Mnookin: "The Times has taken a do-or-die stand for hard-core, boots-on-the-ground journalism, for earnest civic purpose, for the primacy of content creators over aggregators, and has brought itself back from the precipice."BNET's Jim Edwards said it's premature for Mnookin to say the Times is back, but Reuters' Felix Salmon, a former Times paywall skeptic, agreed with Mnookin that the paywall is working, saying he's glad the Times has shown a porous paywall can work. The other Times-related item is firmly in the hypothetical realm, but it generated at least as much conversation as the real-world pay plan. Last week, web designer Andy Rutledge critiqued the Times' online design and proposed his own version, emphasizing headlines, time stamps, authors, and separating news from opinion. The response wasn't particularly positive. The redesign was generally trashed on Twitter, with a typical sentiment expressed by 10,000 Words' Lauren Rabaino: "It’s hard to take seriously a design that completely ignores the constraints of a typical newspaper." One of the most comprehensive responses came from Guardian developer Martin Belam, who pointed out things like faces, article summaries, and points of social connection that Rutledge was missing. The Lab's Joshua Benton argued that Rutledge's redesign doesn't acknowledge that "the problems of large-scale information architecture for news sites are really hard problems." Meanwhile, Belgian developer Stijn Debrouwere went the other direction, asking for more unrealistic mockups like this one to help us brainstorm what news sites could look like. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said the problem with the Times' site is that it's designed as if readers are interested in everything the paper produces, which is almost never the case. And Paul Scrivens said both Rutledge and the Times should look outside the news industry for design cues. — Google+ growing pains: Google+ continues to grow at a ridiculous pace — far faster than either Facebook or Twitter, as Idealab's Bill Gross pointed out — and as Simon Dumenco of Ad Age argued, the platform represents a social media do-over for a lot of users. It's still generating dissent, though, with much of it stemming from Google+'s policy toward business pages. As Google's Christian Oestlien wrote late last week, the company is working on a business profile template that will be up in the next few months, but they're deleting business pages (including news organization pages) in the meantime. A few companies will get trial pages before they're available to everyone, and others have found workarounds — the tech blog Mashable managed to keep all its followers by simply changing its page name to the name of its CEO, Pete Cashmore. That got other members of the tech press worked up, including Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, who urged Google to restore the deleted pages and let businesses create pages normally. TechCrunch's MG Siegler said Google is essentially creating its own version of Twitter's Suggested User List, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM made the case for why this is a big deal. Elsewhere in the world of Google+, Mathew Ingram wrote about the issues it's dealing with regarding anonymity, and the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal is experimenting with a daily news roundup on his personal page there. The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined Google+'s usefulness as a news tool, concluding that while it has potential, it needs a bigger, broader user base to start to really challenge Twitter and Facebook. — The end of media moguls?: The News Corp. phone hacking scandal shifted down a gear this week, but there were still a few developments to report. The News of the World hacking victims also reportedly included the mother of an 8-year-old murder victim, and two former employees testified that they had told James Murdoch that the hacking was widespread, contradicting what Murdoch had told Parliament last week. Other News Corp. veterans challenged the picture Rupert Murdoch painted of himself as a largely hands-off newspaper boss. The New York Times' David Carr wrote that James Murdoch is done, and that Rupert has finally been revealed as vulnerable. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis was more emphatic, calling Murdoch the last media mogul: "The mogul is extinct. The kind of big media institution he built will follow him. Lovely chaos will follow. It’s called democracy." The Washington Post's Erik Wemple took a quick look at what a post-Murdoch world might look like. A couple of other News Corp.-related avenues to chase down: Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review argued that a scandal like News of the World's won't happen in the U.S., and News Corp.'s newest property, the tablet publication The Daily, appears to be floundering, according to a New York Observer feature, though a new version was released last week. — Reading roundup: There wasn't a whole lot to take in this week, but here's a quick sampling: — The FCC is releasing a series of studies on media ownership, one of the newest of which suggested that media cross-ownership (ownership of multiple media outlets within a single market) doesn't hurt local news, and may actually help it. — Wisconsin j-prof Stephen Ward made a thoughtful case for redefining objectivity in the digital age. — Particularly for the Twitter skeptics and writing teachers out there, Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore put together a great post outlining the ways Twitter has made her a better writer. — Finally, I've been trying to cover this piecemeal discussion here, but the AP's Jonathan Stray did a much better job of summarizing the recent conversation about the changing structure of news stories with a fantastic reading list. Now that you're done with this link-fest, be sure to give that one a look-through, too.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-design-and-the-times-google-growing-pains-and-the-extinction-of-the-mogul/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:10:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=915

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get $3 million to $4 million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com 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-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 11, 2011.] Google+ courts businesses: After banning businesses for its first four months, Google+ finally let them in this week, launching Google+ Pages, which gives accounts to business and groups. (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land put together the best walkthrough of what Pages are and how they work.) Businesses jumped right in, including, of course, news orgs: Breaking News put together a running list of news Pages, and one Fox News show announced it would do Hangouts with presidential candidates, starting with Mitt Romney next week. As Business Insider explained, Google has a big carrot to draw businesses in: Direct Connect, which allows users to go directly to a business's Google+ Page if they the business's name preceded by a "+". Lost Remote's Cory Bergman (who also runs the Breaking News Google+ account) said businesses should also get some SEO mojo from users clicking +1 on their Google+ account, which he argued was enough of a payoff to justify maintaining a Google+ account — at least for now, anyway. Social media guru Robert Scoble, on the other hand, was disappointed in Pages, calling them clumsy and difficult to manage. Fast Company's Mark Wilson brought up the same point and added that since Google gives individuals two options of how to engage with businesses instead of Facebook's single "Like," most people will choose the weaker option. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid wondered what exactly that weaker option, giving the business a +1, will do. For Slate's Farhad Manjoo, the addition of Pages was too little, too late for Google+. He declared the social network dead, a victim of Google's launch-then-fix-it model that has worked so well for most of its products. "But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place," Manjoo wrote, arguing that Google should have let its users be more free to experiment to make up for its initial deficits. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and the New York Times' Nick Bilton countered that it's too soon to give up on the network, because Google+ is designed to be not just another social network, but instead the connective tissue integrating an entire way to experience the web. Google has some pretty good cards still its hand that can help it reach that goal, too, he said. — Romenesko, attribution, and hair-splitting: Jim Romenesko, the dean of media bloggers soon to semi-retire from the Poynter Institute, was pushed into a bizarre little controversy yesterday when his editor, Julie Moos, wrote a post taking him to task for "incomplete attribution" in his posts — essentially, using language from the posts he's summarizing (and linking to) without putting it in quote marks. Moos wrote the post in response to questions from the Columbia Journalism Review as it develops an article on the subject. Romenesko wasn't asked to resign (he offered his resignation twice but Moos rejected it), but he will have to follow stricter attribution guidelines and have his posts edited before they go up. 10,000 Words' Elena Zak praised Poynter's transparency, but to most observers, this was ethical hairsplitting run amok. Media consultant Mark Potts hit many of the main points in his defense of Romenesko, noting that no one has complained to Poynter about this in the decade he's been blogging for them. Reuters' Felix Salmon pointed to Romenesko's stature in the blogosphere and his role in establishing the field's norms: "If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines." The Awl's Choire Sicha took the opportunity to level a more serious charge at Poynter's handling of Romenesko's blog, saying that "Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost 'engagement'" and other online-media buzzwords. For his part, Romenesko himself expressed his frustration in typically understated fashion in an email to the New York Times, then tweeted that "I feel it's time to go." — Is future-of-news talk hurting journalism?: This week, we got the rare opportunity to have a substantive, big-picture (meta)discussion about the way we think about the future of news when the Columbia Journalism Review published a thorough critique by Dean Starkman of 'future of news' thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen. The piece is quite long, but worth a close read: In short, Starkman argued that these thinkers are undermining the most valuable form of journalism — public-service journalism — by disempowering journalists and their institutions and by wasting their limited time (and the public's) with endless, mostly useless experimentation and busywork. Instead, Starkman proposed a model built around maintaining journalism's most valued institutions, arguing that "journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself." Several people objected to Starkman's argument, starting with media strategist Terry Heaton, who countered that it's not institutions the future-of-news people have a problem with, but hierarchical institutions, and former Wall Street Journal writer Jason Fry, who said that some forms of news are indeed a commodity. A few ot