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-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] The Guardian opens up its news agenda: The Guardian took a significant step in the evolution from a closed to open newsroom this week, allowing the public access to a live account of its internal list of planned news stories. In his announcement of the experiment, Dan Roberts said that it would start with a short trial and that it wouldn't include exclusives, embargoes or legally sensitive unconfirmed material. He also concluded with the rationale behind the bold move: "It seems there are more people wanting to know where their news comes from and how it is made. Painful as it might be for journalists to acknowledge, they might even have some improvements to make on the recipe too." Here's the newslist — yup, it looks pretty much like a simple version of standard newsroom budget. Roberts talked to Mashable about how helpful Twitter has been in pulling the plan off, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM praised the move as one other news organizations should emulate, arguing that not only does it benefit the news organization with more ideas and feedback, but that users are beginning to expect this kind of openness. Others were more skeptical. Elena Zak of 10,000 Words wondered if the Guardian's experiment is just a dressed-up version of the status quo, since the paper's editors are still maintaining all of the control over what gets published and what doesn't. And j-prof Andrew Cline took issue with Roberts' statement that this move is "a bit of a leap," pointing to a student news project that's opened its coverage plans via Facebook since it began. "It was a 'bit of a leap' 10 years ago. Today it’s what I’m teaching my journalism students," Cline wrote. — Circulation scandal at the Journal: News Corp.'s series of scandals reached the Wall Street Journal this week with a report that the Journal channeled money through a European company to buy copies of its own paper, in exchange for favorable coverage in the paper's pages. Just before the report surfaced, the man at the center of the scandal, a European executive at Journal parent company Dow Jones named Andrew Langhoff, resigned, and the whistleblower was fired in January. The Guardian, which broke the story, also reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation watchdog, will investigate the issue. The Journal itself confirmed many of the scandal's elements with its own story published the following day. Poynter's Steve Myers put together a good summary of the story and a quick roundup of the reaction, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review provided some more reporting on the Journal's coverage of its alleged circulation-inflating partner. Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that the Journal's favorable coverage was in a special section, where fewer people were likely to read it and take it seriously, and that even with the scandal, Wall Street Journal Europe's circulation only reached 75,000. Several observers pointed out, as Chittum put it, that News Corp. keeps showing a habit of covering up its misdeeds rather than being honest about them. The result of this is that everyone will assume the worst about any possible News Corp. scandal, according to Reuters' Felix Salmon. The next step, Salmon said, is for the scandals to spread beyond newspapers to Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, which would be truly disastrous for Rupert Murdoch. — Steve Jobs, devotion, and control: The tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs continued to pour in late last week after his death last Wednesday. Technology Review editor Jason Pontin continued with the theme of Jobs' love for creating products themselves, and tech guru Guy Kawasaki reflected on 12 business lessons he learned from Jobs. The most interesting of those lessons was that customers can't tell you what they need: "If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, 'Better, faster, and cheaper;—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using." Others reflected on the flood of appreciation for Jobs upon his death and the devotion of Apple fans: TechCrunch's MG Siegler talked about Jobs as "the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology, and John Biggs mused about Jobs as a pop-culture artist. At Fast Company, j-prof Adam Penenberg wrote about the way the uniqueness of Apple's products have had an addictive effect on us. Some commentary was more critical. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan pointed to Apple's track record of censorship and authoritarianism and Jobs' brusque personal style, and the Knight Center's Summer Harlow documented Jobs' often strained relationship with journalism. Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey went deeper into Jobs' controlling behavior toward journalists, noting, as Dan Gillmor put it in his piece, Apple's "uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." — New and old media within a protest movement: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the biggest ongoing stories in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks, featuring heavily in online discussion and garnering increasing coverage from traditional media. The story has some relevance for the future-of-news discussion as well: The New York Times' David Carr looked at the production of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, noting with some nostalgic pride the enduring role of newspapers in protest movements. News designer Mario Garcia was also surprised and pleased that so many young protesters would use various media, including a newspaper, as part of their movement's voice. The Times also examined another media tool being used by Occupy Wall Street protesters — Pastebin, a site created as a way for programmers to save and share code, but now being used as a (mostly) anonymous place to share protest information. Nitasha Tiku of BetaBeat pointed out that Pastebin was also used as a hangout for IRC, particularly for the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, well before Occupy Wall Street came on the scene. Meanwhile, Erika Fry of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the New York Police Department's efforts to issue and enforce press credentials at the protests, once again raising thorny questions about who is and isn't a journalist. — Reading roundup: It's been a somewhat slower week this week news-wise, but there were still a few other interesting issues that are worth keeping up on: — Facebook released its long-anticipated iPad app this week: The New York Times has some of the basic features (it's free), and All Things Digital detailed the process Facebook developers went through to get their own app and other Facebook-based apps onto Apple devices. — A few bits on news paywalls: PaidContent reported on Press+'s efforts to sell paywalls to college newspapers (Press+ is the name of the now-bought-out Journalism Online's paid-content system). Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explored how news organizations decide whether to take paywalls down for huge news events, and NetNewsCheck examined the market-wide effects of one newspaper's paywall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — We've heard a lot of talk about "Digital First" lately, particularly from folks within the Journal Register Co. Steve Yelvington, who works within fellow newspaper chain Morris Communications, offered a sharp, succinct explanation of what a Digital First transition entails. One key concept: accepting audience responsibility, not just news responsibility. — The Lab had a few fantastic pieces this week (no, Josh didn't tell me to write that) — j-profs Nikki Usher and Seth Lewis on what journalism can learn from open-source and maker culture, Megan Garber looking for lessons in failed Wikipedia-like efforts, and New York Times developer Jacob Harris went on a delightful rant against word clouds.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:41:19 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=903

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

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

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 16, 2011.] Paid and free, side by side: The Boston Globe became the latest news organization to institute an online paywall this week, but it did so in an unprecedented way that should be interesting to watch: The newspaper created a separate paid site, BostonGlobe.com, to run alongside its existing free site, Boston.com. PaidContent has the pertinent details: A single price (.99 a week), and Boston.com gets most of the breaking news and sports, while BostonGlobe.com gets most of the newspaper content. The Lab's Justin Ellis, meanwhile, has a look at the lab that designed it all. As the Globe told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, the two sites were designed with two different types of readers in mind: One who has a deep appreciation for in-depth journalism and likes to read stories start-to-finish, and another who reads news casually and briefly and may be more concerned about entertainment or basic information than journalism per se. The first thing that caught many people's attention was new site's design — simple, clean, and understated. Tech blogger John Gruber gave it a thumbs-up, and news design guru Mario Garcia called it "probably the most significant new website design in a long time." The Lab's Joshua Benton identified the biggest reasons it looks so clean: Far fewer links and ads. Benton (in the most comprehensive post on the new site) also emphasized a less noticeable but equally important aspect of BostonGlobe.com's design: It adjusts to fit just about any browser size, which eliminates the need for mobile apps, making life easier for programmers and, as j-prof Dan Kennedy noted at the Lab, a way around the cut of app fees required by Apple and others. If the Globe's people "have figured out a way not to share their hard-earned revenues with gatekeepers such as Apple and Amazon, then they will have truly performed a service for the news business — and for journalism," Kennedy said. Of course, the Globe could launch the most brilliantly conceived news site on the web, but it won't be a success unless enough people pay for it. Poynter's Sonderman (like Kennedy) was skeptical of their ability to do that, though as the Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen pointed out, the Globe's plan may be aimed as much at retaining print subscribers as making money off the web. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wondered if readers will find enough at BostonGlobe.com that's not at Boston.com to make the site worth their money. — The TechCrunch conflict and changing ethical standards: Last week's flap between AOL and TechCrunch over the tech site's ethical conflicts came to an official resolution on Monday, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington parted ways with AOL, the site's owner. But its full effects are going to be rippling for quite a while: Gawker's Ryan Tate called the fiasco a black eye for everyone involved, but especially AOL, which had approved Arrington's investments in some of the companies he covers just a few months ago. Fellow media mogul Barry Diller also ripped AOL's handling of the situation. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said that while he doesn't trust TechCrunch much personally, it's the audience's job to sort out their trust with the help of transparency, rather than traditional journalism's strictures. Others placed more of the blame on TechCrunch: Former Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons said TechCrunch's people should have expected this type of scenario when they sold to a big corporation, and media analyst Frederic Filloux said TechCrunch is a perfect example of the blogosphere's vulnerability to unchecked conflicts of interest. There was more fuel for those kinds of ethical concerns this week, as the winning company at TechCrunch's annual Disrupt competition was one that Arrington invests in. But Arrington had an ethical accusation of his own to make at the conference, pointing out that the New York Times invests in a tech venture capital fund which has put .5 million into GigaOM, a TechCrunch competitor. Poynter's Steve Myers detailed the Times' run-ins between the companies it invests in and the ones it covers (and its spotty disclosure about those connections), concluding that even if the conflict is less direct than in blogging, it's still worth examining more closely. As it plunged further into its battle with TechCrunch late last week, AOL was also reported to be talking with Yahoo, which recently fired its CEO, about a merger between the two Internet giants. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher said there's no way the deal would actually happen, and Wired's Tim Carmody called it a "spectacularly crazy idea" and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram agreed, while Business Insider reminded us that they said a year ago that AOL and Yahoo should merge. Meanwhile, the New York Times' David Carr homed in on the core problem that both companies are facing: The fact that people want information online from niche sites, not giant general-news portals. "As news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information," he wrote. — Facebook opens to subscribers: It hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as some of its other moves, but Facebook took another step in Twitter's direction this week by introducing the Subscribe Button, which allows users to see other people's (and groups') status updates without friending or becoming a fan of them. As GeekWire's Monica Guzman and many others noted, Facebook's "subscribe" looks a heck of a lot like Twitter's "follow." When asked about similar Google+ features at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a Facebook exec said it wasn't a response to Google+. Guzman said Facebook is putting down deeper roots by going beyond the limits of reciprocal friendship, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingrampinpointed the reason why this could end up being a massive change for Facebook: It's beginning to move Facebook from a symmetrical network to an asymmetrical one, which could fundamentally transform its dynamics. Still, Ingram said Twitter is much better oriented toward being an information network than Facebook is, even with a "Subscribe" button. The change could have particularly interesting implications for journalists, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explained in his brief outline of the feature. As he noted, it may eliminate the need for separate Facebook profiles and pages for journalists, and while Lost Remote's Cory Bergman said that should be a welcome change for journalists who were trying to manage both, he noted that shows and organizations may want to stick with pages. — News Corp.'s scandal widens: An update on the ongoing scandal enveloping News Corp.: A group of U.S. banks and investment funds that own shares in News Corp. expanded a lawsuit to include allegations of stealing, hacking, and anti-competitive behavior by two of the company's U.S. subsidiaries — an advertiser and a satellite TV hardware manufacturer. As the Washington Post's Erik Wemple noted, these are old cases, but they're getting fresh attention, and that's how scandals gain momentum. James Murdoch, the son of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, was also recalled to testify again before members of Britain's Parliament later this fall, facing new questions about the breadth of News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal. The Wall Street Journal examined the scandal's impact on the elder Murdoch's succession plan for the conglomerate, especially as it involves James. The company's executives also announced this week that they've found tens of thousands of documents that could shed more light on the phone hacking cases. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on this week: — The biggest news story this week, of course, is actually 10 years old: Here's a look at how newspapers marked the anniversary of 9/11, how news orgs used digital technology to tell the story, and a reflection on how 9/11 changed the media landscape. — Twitter introduced a new web analytics tool to measure Twitter's impact on websites. Here's an analysis from Mathew Ingram of GigaOM. — At an academic conference last weekend, Illinois j-prof Robert McChesney repeated his call for public funding for journalism. Here are a couple of good summaries of his talk from fellow j-profs Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida. — Finally, here's a relatively short but insightful two-part interview between two digital media luminaries, Henry Jenkins and Dan Gillmor, about media literacy, citizen journalism and Gillmor's latest book. Should make for a quick, thought-provoking weekend read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/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-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:43:08 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=860

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

This Week in Review: AOL’s big HuffPo buy, converging media in Egypt, and waiting on The Daily

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 5, 2011.] How right do we need to be on Twitter?: It's not particularly uncommon for false information to spread on Twitter under the guise of breaking news, and that's what happened late last week, when several journalists spread the rumor that CNN's Piers Morgan had been suspended from his show as part of the fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal, which turned out to be untrue. This misinformation, however, led to the most interesting discussion on Twitter and accuracy we've seen in a while. It started with Reuters' Felix Salmon, one of those who tweeted the Morgan rumor, defending the practice of quickly tweeting breaking news (false, in some cases) and then quickly correcting it. "Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false," he wrote. While news organizations' official accounts should stick to confirmed reports, individual reporters should be able to tweet unconfirmed information, Salmon said, as long as they attribute it properly and correct it quickly. Several writers objected to this line of reasoning: Fishbowl NY's Chris O'Shea said Salmon should be committed to tweeting true information because the fact that he's seen as a credible news source is the reason people follow him on Twitter in the first place. The Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman countered that Twitter is much closer to publishing than a newsroom meeting: "The reason people feel a bit of embarrassment after making a mistake on Twitter is precisely because it’s so public." And Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review said Salmon's strategy constitutes a reckless disregard for reporters' individual brand and reputation. Others were more sympathetic to Salmon's point. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pushed back against Rieder, arguing that news is a process, not just the publication of a finished product, and Twitter is part of that process. Salmon's editor at Reuters, Anthony DeRosa, who also tweeted the Morgan rumor, agreed with Salmon that Twitter is a newsroom, but vowed to be more careful to tweet verified information. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry, meanwhile, said that the dichotomy between being first and being right is a false one for journalists — and that journalists should strive for both. — A new tool for the new newsroom: Chartbeat, which does real-time analytics for websites, launched a news-oriented version of its tool last week called Newsbeat. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together a good overview of the service, which includes more detail about traffic trends and sources than Chartbeat. In an interview with GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, Chartbeat's Tony Haile answered the objection that this type of data will just lead to a "tyranny of the popular," arguing instead that the service may instead show journalists how they're underestimating their audiences, or how they can repackage news stories to make them more understandable to readers. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal provided an example from his own experience, noting that Chartbeat has shown that a surprising number of offbeat longform stories there generate big traffic. Newsbeat, he said, could help the mass of news sources fighting for attention online each find their sweet spot. "I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet," he said. At Wired, Tim Carmody emphasized the real-time nature of the information, noting that the need for that kind of information is growing as news organizations are increasingly editing and publishing in real time, too. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber was intrigued by the fact that Newsbeat offers individualized dashboards for each writer and editor's content. The feature, she reasoned, demonstrates the increased encouragement of entrepreneurialism within the modern newsroom: "Increasingly, the gates of production are swinging open to journalists throughout, if not fully across, the newsroom. That’s a good thing. It’s also a big thing. And Newsbeat is reflecting it." — A truly daily tablet publication: Seems almost every other week we have a new entry into the tablet news market; this week it's AOL, which launched its daily tablet magazine Editions this week. All Things Digital and Poynter have good overviews of what the new publication is: Notably, it's delivered to your tablet just once a day (at the time of your choosing), with a set ending page, and without any updates. It's big on personalization, tailoring news to each user a bit like Pandora, and it also includes some local news and, as Poynter noted, primarily aims to recreate the print experience (a fake mailing label, even!). To the people behind Editions, its lack of updates and finite, print-like interface are assets: As one of them told the New York Times, "For a lot of people, [continual updating] becomes oppressive. This is not tapping you on the shoulder all the time." But at TechCrunch (which is also owned by AOL), Erick Schonfeld was skeptical, asserting that if he feels like he's getting day-old news on Editions, he'll just stick to the web. "News apps need to be as current as the Web. Those are just table stakes," he wrote. Mashable's Lauren Indvik, on the other hand, was rather impressed, saying the finiteness of the magazine provides a nice contrast to the unruliness of the web. — The scandal goes stateside: A couple of updates on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal: The story is beginning to migrate across the Atlantic, as attention begins to shift toward several accusations of spying made years ago against News Corp. holdings in the United States. Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke this story open earlier this summer, was reportedly in the States this week investigating News Corp. At New York magazine, Frank Rich urged Americans to look more closely into Murdoch's behavior here: "We’ve become so inured to Murdoch tactics over the years—and so many people in public life have been frightened, silenced, co-opted, or even seduced by them—that we have minimized his impact exactly the way his publicists hoped we would, downgrading News Corp. misbehavior merely to tabloid vulgarity and right-wing attack-dog politics." Two other notes: The News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is surveying subscribers about its image in light of the phone hacking scandal, and the American Journalism Review's John Morton said that for all his faults, Rupert Murdoch's heart is in newspapers, something he appreciates. — Reading roundup: Several things journalists and educators might find useful this week: — Some smaller papers in the Lee Enterprises chain are going to be trying out metered-model online pay plans, which include a small charge for the website even for print subscribers. Poynter's Rick Edmonds explained why. And at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at how the economics of circulation and advertising are moving online. — There are still a few places where print is still king — among the wealthy, for instance, as data from this Ad Age survey show. — A few great how-to's and suggestions: Journalism.co.uk's SEO primer for journalists; Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams' six proposals for journalism education; and a quick guide to data journalism from the Guardian. — Finally, media analyst Alan Mutter made a strong case for why newspapers' business model will never stabilize and urged them to begin "intelligently, and speedily, de-stabilizing their enterprises." It's a case that's been made many times before, but one that probably needs to be heard again.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/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

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

]]> [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-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

Buy Casodex Without Prescription

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] The Guardian opens up its news agenda: The Guardian took a significant step in the evolution from a closed to open newsroom this week, allowing the public access to a live account of its internal list of planned news stories. In his announcement of the experiment, Dan Roberts said that it would start with a short trial and that it wouldn't include exclusives, embargoes or legally sensitive unconfirmed material. He also concluded with the rationale behind the bold move: "It seems there are more people wanting to know where their news comes from and how it is made. Painful as it might be for journalists to acknowledge, they might even have some improvements to make on the recipe too." Here's the newslist — yup, it looks pretty much like a simple version of standard newsroom budget. Roberts talked to Mashable about how helpful Twitter has been in pulling the plan off, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM praised the move as one other news organizations should emulate, arguing that not only does it benefit the news organization with more ideas and feedback, but that users are beginning to expect this kind of openness. Others were more skeptical. Elena Zak of 10,000 Words wondered if the Guardian's experiment is just a dressed-up version of the status quo, since the paper's editors are still maintaining all of the control over what gets published and what doesn't. And j-prof Andrew Cline took issue with Roberts' statement that this move is "a bit of a leap," pointing to a student news project that's opened its coverage plans via Facebook since it began. "It was a 'bit of a leap' 10 years ago. Today it’s what I’m teaching my journalism students," Cline wrote. — Circulation scandal at the Journal: News Corp.'s series of scandals reached the Wall Street Journal this week with a report that the Journal channeled money through a European company to buy copies of its own paper, in exchange for favorable coverage in the paper's pages. Just before the report surfaced, the man at the center of the scandal, a European executive at Journal parent company Dow Jones named Andrew Langhoff, resigned, and the whistleblower was fired in January. The Guardian, which broke the story, also reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation watchdog, will investigate the issue. The Journal itself confirmed many of the scandal's elements with its own story published the following day. Poynter's Steve Myers put together a good summary of the story and a quick roundup of the reaction, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review provided some more reporting on the Journal's coverage of its alleged circulation-inflating partner. Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that the Journal's favorable coverage was in a special section, where fewer people were likely to read it and take it seriously, and that even with the scandal, Wall Street Journal Europe's circulation only reached 75,000. Several observers pointed out, as Chittum put it, that News Corp. keeps showing a habit of covering up its misdeeds rather than being honest about them. The result of this is that everyone will assume the worst about any possible News Corp. scandal, according to Reuters' Felix Salmon. The next step, Salmon said, is for the scandals to spread beyond newspapers to Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, which would be truly disastrous for Rupert Murdoch. — Steve Jobs, devotion, and control: The tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs continued to pour in late last week after his death last Wednesday. Technology Review editor Jason Pontin continued with the theme of Jobs' love for creating products themselves, and tech guru Guy Kawasaki reflected on 12 business lessons he learned from Jobs. The most interesting of those lessons was that customers can't tell you what they need: "If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, 'Better, faster, and cheaper;—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using." Others reflected on the flood of appreciation for Jobs upon his death and the devotion of Apple fans: TechCrunch's MG Siegler talked about Jobs as "the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology, and John Biggs mused about Jobs as a pop-culture artist. At Fast Company, j-prof Adam Penenberg wrote about the way the uniqueness of Apple's products have had an addictive effect on us. Some commentary was more critical. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan pointed to Apple's track record of censorship and authoritarianism and Jobs' brusque personal style, and the Knight Center's Summer Harlow documented Jobs' often strained relationship with journalism. Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey went deeper into Jobs' controlling behavior toward journalists, noting, as Dan Gillmor put it in his piece, Apple's "uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." — New and old media within a protest movement: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the biggest ongoing stories in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks, featuring heavily in online discussion and garnering increasing coverage from traditional media. The story has some relevance for the future-of-news discussion as well: The New York Times' David Carr looked at the production of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, noting with some nostalgic pride the enduring role of newspapers in protest movements. News designer Mario Garcia was also surprised and pleased that so many young protesters would use various media, including a newspaper, as part of their movement's voice. The Times also examined another media tool being used by Occupy Wall Street protesters — Pastebin, a site created as a way for programmers to save and share code, but now being used as a (mostly) anonymous place to share protest information. Nitasha Tiku of BetaBeat pointed out that Pastebin was also used as a hangout for IRC, particularly for the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, well before Occupy Wall Street came on the scene. Meanwhile, Erika Fry of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the New York Police Department's efforts to issue and enforce press credentials at the protests, once again raising thorny questions about who is and isn't a journalist. — Reading roundup: It's been a somewhat slower week this week news-wise, but there were still a few other interesting issues that are worth keeping up on: — Facebook released its long-anticipated iPad app this week: The New York Times has some of the basic features (it's free), and All Things Digital detailed the process Facebook developers went through to get their own app and other Facebook-based apps onto Apple devices. — A few bits on news paywalls: PaidContent reported on Press+'s efforts to sell paywalls to college newspapers (Press+ is the name of the now-bought-out Journalism Online's paid-content system). Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explored how news organizations decide whether to take paywalls down for huge news events, and NetNewsCheck examined the market-wide effects of one newspaper's paywall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — We've heard a lot of talk about "Digital First" lately, particularly from folks within the Journal Register Co. Steve Yelvington, who works within fellow newspaper chain Morris Communications, offered a sharp, succinct explanation of what a Digital First transition entails. One key concept: accepting audience responsibility, not just news responsibility. — The Lab had a few fantastic pieces this week (no, Josh didn't tell me to write that) — j-profs Nikki Usher and Seth Lewis on what journalism can learn from open-source and maker culture, Megan Garber looking for lessons in failed Wikipedia-like efforts, and New York Times developer Jacob Harris went on a delightful rant against word clouds.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:41:19 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=903

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

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

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 16, 2011.] Paid and free, side by side: The Boston Globe became the latest news organization to institute an online paywall this week, but it did so in an unprecedented way that should be interesting to watch: The newspaper created a separate paid site, BostonGlobe.com, to run alongside its existing free site, Boston.com. PaidContent has the pertinent details: A single price (.99 a week), and Boston.com gets most of the breaking news and sports, while BostonGlobe.com gets most of the newspaper content. The Lab's Justin Ellis, meanwhile, has a look at the lab that designed it all. As the Globe told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, the two sites were designed with two different types of readers in mind: One who has a deep appreciation for in-depth journalism and likes to read stories start-to-finish, and another who reads news casually and briefly and may be more concerned about entertainment or basic information than journalism per se. The first thing that caught many people's attention was new site's design — simple, clean, and understated. Tech blogger John Gruber gave it a thumbs-up, and news design guru Mario Garcia called it "probably the most significant new website design in a long time." The Lab's Joshua Benton identified the biggest reasons it looks so clean: Far fewer links and ads. Benton (in the most comprehensive post on the new site) also emphasized a less noticeable but equally important aspect of BostonGlobe.com's design: It adjusts to fit just about any browser size, which eliminates the need for mobile apps, making life easier for programmers and, as j-prof Dan Kennedy noted at the Lab, a way around the cut of app fees required by Apple and others. If the Globe's people "have figured out a way not to share their hard-earned revenues with gatekeepers such as Apple and Amazon, then they will have truly performed a service for the news business — and for journalism," Kennedy said. Of course, the Globe could launch the most brilliantly conceived news site on the web, but it won't be a success unless enough people pay for it. Poynter's Sonderman (like Kennedy) was skeptical of their ability to do that, though as the Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen pointed out, the Globe's plan may be aimed as much at retaining print subscribers as making money off the web. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wondered if readers will find enough at BostonGlobe.com that's not at Boston.com to make the site worth their money. — The TechCrunch conflict and changing ethical standards: Last week's flap between AOL and TechCrunch over the tech site's ethical conflicts came to an official resolution on Monday, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington parted ways with AOL, the site's owner. But its full effects are going to be rippling for quite a while: Gawker's Ryan Tate called the fiasco a black eye for everyone involved, but especially AOL, which had approved Arrington's investments in some of the companies he covers just a few months ago. Fellow media mogul Barry Diller also ripped AOL's handling of the situation. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said that while he doesn't trust TechCrunch much personally, it's the audience's job to sort out their trust with the help of transparency, rather than traditional journalism's strictures. Others placed more of the blame on TechCrunch: Former Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons said TechCrunch's people should have expected this type of scenario when they sold to a big corporation, and media analyst Frederic Filloux said TechCrunch is a perfect example of the blogosphere's vulnerability to unchecked conflicts of interest. There was more fuel for those kinds of ethical concerns this week, as the winning company at TechCrunch's annual Disrupt competition was one that Arrington invests in. But Arrington had an ethical accusation of his own to make at the conference, pointing out that the New York Times invests in a tech venture capital fund which has put .5 million into GigaOM, a TechCrunch competitor. Poynter's Steve Myers detailed the Times' run-ins between the companies it invests in and the ones it covers (and its spotty disclosure about those connections), concluding that even if the conflict is less direct than in blogging, it's still worth examining more closely. As it plunged further into its battle with TechCrunch late last week, AOL was also reported to be talking with Yahoo, which recently fired its CEO, about a merger between the two Internet giants. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher said there's no way the deal would actually happen, and Wired's Tim Carmody called it a "spectacularly crazy idea" and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram agreed, while Business Insider reminded us that they said a year ago that AOL and Yahoo should merge. Meanwhile, the New York Times' David Carr homed in on the core problem that both companies are facing: The fact that people want information online from niche sites, not giant general-news portals. "As news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information," he wrote. — Facebook opens to subscribers: It hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as some of its other moves, but Facebook took another step in Twitter's direction this week by introducing the Subscribe Button, which allows users to see other people's (and groups') status updates without friending or becoming a fan of them. As GeekWire's Monica Guzman and many others noted, Facebook's "subscribe" looks a heck of a lot like Twitter's "follow." When asked about similar Google+ features at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a Facebook exec said it wasn't a response to Google+. Guzman said Facebook is putting down deeper roots by going beyond the limits of reciprocal friendship, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingrampinpointed the reason why this could end up being a massive change for Facebook: It's beginning to move Facebook from a symmetrical network to an asymmetrical one, which could fundamentally transform its dynamics. Still, Ingram said Twitter is much better oriented toward being an information network than Facebook is, even with a "Subscribe" button. The change could have particularly interesting implications for journalists, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explained in his brief outline of the feature. As he noted, it may eliminate the need for separate Facebook profiles and pages for journalists, and while Lost Remote's Cory Bergman said that should be a welcome change for journalists who were trying to manage both, he noted that shows and organizations may want to stick with pages. — News Corp.'s scandal widens: An update on the ongoing scandal enveloping News Corp.: A group of U.S. banks and investment funds that own shares in News Corp. expanded a lawsuit to include allegations of stealing, hacking, and anti-competitive behavior by two of the company's U.S. subsidiaries — an advertiser and a satellite TV hardware manufacturer. As the Washington Post's Erik Wemple noted, these are old cases, but they're getting fresh attention, and that's how scandals gain momentum. James Murdoch, the son of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, was also recalled to testify again before members of Britain's Parliament later this fall, facing new questions about the breadth of News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal. The Wall Street Journal examined the scandal's impact on the elder Murdoch's succession plan for the conglomerate, especially as it involves James. The company's executives also announced this week that they've found tens of thousands of documents that could shed more light on the phone hacking cases. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on this week: — The biggest news story this week, of course, is actually 10 years old: Here's a look at how newspapers marked the anniversary of 9/11, how news orgs used digital technology to tell the story, and a reflection on how 9/11 changed the media landscape. — Twitter introduced a new web analytics tool to measure Twitter's impact on websites. Here's an analysis from Mathew Ingram of GigaOM. — At an academic conference last weekend, Illinois j-prof Robert McChesney repeated his call for public funding for journalism. Here are a couple of good summaries of his talk from fellow j-profs Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida. — Finally, here's a relatively short but insightful two-part interview between two digital media luminaries, Henry Jenkins and Dan Gillmor, about media literacy, citizen journalism and Gillmor's latest book. Should make for a quick, thought-provoking weekend read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/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-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:43:08 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=860

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

This Week in Review: AOL’s big HuffPo buy, converging media in Egypt, and waiting on The Daily

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 5, 2011.] How right do we need to be on Twitter?: It's not particularly uncommon for false information to spread on Twitter under the guise of breaking news, and that's what happened late last week, when several journalists spread the rumor that CNN's Piers Morgan had been suspended from his show as part of the fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal, which turned out to be untrue. This misinformation, however, led to the most interesting discussion on Twitter and accuracy we've seen in a while. It started with Reuters' Felix Salmon, one of those who tweeted the Morgan rumor, defending the practice of quickly tweeting breaking news (false, in some cases) and then quickly correcting it. "Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false," he wrote. While news organizations' official accounts should stick to confirmed reports, individual reporters should be able to tweet unconfirmed information, Salmon said, as long as they attribute it properly and correct it quickly. Several writers objected to this line of reasoning: Fishbowl NY's Chris O'Shea said Salmon should be committed to tweeting true information because the fact that he's seen as a credible news source is the reason people follow him on Twitter in the first place. The Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman countered that Twitter is much closer to publishing than a newsroom meeting: "The reason people feel a bit of embarrassment after making a mistake on Twitter is precisely because it’s so public." And Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review said Salmon's strategy constitutes a reckless disregard for reporters' individual brand and reputation. Others were more sympathetic to Salmon's point. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pushed back against Rieder, arguing that news is a process, not just the publication of a finished product, and Twitter is part of that process. Salmon's editor at Reuters, Anthony DeRosa, who also tweeted the Morgan rumor, agreed with Salmon that Twitter is a newsroom, but vowed to be more careful to tweet verified information. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry, meanwhile, said that the dichotomy between being first and being right is a false one for journalists — and that journalists should strive for both. — A new tool for the new newsroom: Chartbeat, which does real-time analytics for websites, launched a news-oriented version of its tool last week called Newsbeat. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together a good overview of the service, which includes more detail about traffic trends and sources than Chartbeat. In an interview with GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, Chartbeat's Tony Haile answered the objection that this type of data will just lead to a "tyranny of the popular," arguing instead that the service may instead show journalists how they're underestimating their audiences, or how they can repackage news stories to make them more understandable to readers. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal provided an example from his own experience, noting that Chartbeat has shown that a surprising number of offbeat longform stories there generate big traffic. Newsbeat, he said, could help the mass of news sources fighting for attention online each find their sweet spot. "I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet," he said. At Wired, Tim Carmody emphasized the real-time nature of the information, noting that the need for that kind of information is growing as news organizations are increasingly editing and publishing in real time, too. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber was intrigued by the fact that Newsbeat offers individualized dashboards for each writer and editor's content. The feature, she reasoned, demonstrates the increased encouragement of entrepreneurialism within the modern newsroom: "Increasingly, the gates of production are swinging open to journalists throughout, if not fully across, the newsroom. That’s a good thing. It’s also a big thing. And Newsbeat is reflecting it." — A truly daily tablet publication: Seems almost every other week we have a new entry into the tablet news market; this week it's AOL, which launched its daily tablet magazine Editions this week. All Things Digital and Poynter have good overviews of what the new publication is: Notably, it's delivered to your tablet just once a day (at the time of your choosing), with a set ending page, and without any updates. It's big on personalization, tailoring news to each user a bit like Pandora, and it also includes some local news and, as Poynter noted, primarily aims to recreate the print experience (a fake mailing label, even!). To the people behind Editions, its lack of updates and finite, print-like interface are assets: As one of them told the New York Times, "For a lot of people, [continual updating] becomes oppressive. This is not tapping you on the shoulder all the time." But at TechCrunch (which is also owned by AOL), Erick Schonfeld was skeptical, asserting that if he feels like he's getting day-old news on Editions, he'll just stick to the web. "News apps need to be as current as the Web. Those are just table stakes," he wrote. Mashable's Lauren Indvik, on the other hand, was rather impressed, saying the finiteness of the magazine provides a nice contrast to the unruliness of the web. — The scandal goes stateside: A couple of updates on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal: The story is beginning to migrate across the Atlantic, as attention begins to shift toward several accusations of spying made years ago against News Corp. holdings in the United States. Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke this story open earlier this summer, was reportedly in the States this week investigating News Corp. At New York magazine, Frank Rich urged Americans to look more closely into Murdoch's behavior here: "We’ve become so inured to Murdoch tactics over the years—and so many people in public life have been frightened, silenced, co-opted, or even seduced by them—that we have minimized his impact exactly the way his publicists hoped we would, downgrading News Corp. misbehavior merely to tabloid vulgarity and right-wing attack-dog politics." Two other notes: The News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is surveying subscribers about its image in light of the phone hacking scandal, and the American Journalism Review's John Morton said that for all his faults, Rupert Murdoch's heart is in newspapers, something he appreciates. — Reading roundup: Several things journalists and educators might find useful this week: — Some smaller papers in the Lee Enterprises chain are going to be trying out metered-model online pay plans, which include a small charge for the website even for print subscribers. Poynter's Rick Edmonds explained why. And at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at how the economics of circulation and advertising are moving online. — There are still a few places where print is still king — among the wealthy, for instance, as data from this Ad Age survey show. — A few great how-to's and suggestions: Journalism.co.uk's SEO primer for journalists; Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams' six proposals for journalism education; and a quick guide to data journalism from the Guardian. — Finally, media analyst Alan Mutter made a strong case for why newspapers' business model will never stabilize and urged them to begin "intelligently, and speedily, de-stabilizing their enterprises." It's a case that's been made many times before, but one that probably needs to be heard again.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/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

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

]]> [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-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Oct. 28, 2011.] News consumers and paid content on tablets: We're now a year and a half into the tablet era, so we've started to get a more stable sense of exactly who's using them and how. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism added to that understanding this week with what's probably the most comprehensive study to date on tablet use, particularly for news. The survey's big headline was of the good-news, bad-news variety: 77% of users read news on their tablets at least weekly, and 53% do it daily. That's the good news. The bad news? Only 14% have paid directly for the news they're reading on their tablet — though another 23% get access as part of a print subscription package. And those who haven't paid valued the free-ness of their news sources pretty highly. The fact that people love to read news on their iPads but aren't particularly willing to pay for it didn't seem to worry PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel too much — he told Adweek that things will be different in a year or two as people get used to paying for tablet news, just as they got used to paying for TV. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted that while most users prefer to get their news via browser, many of those in the paying crowd are the ones using mostly apps. He suggested going with a two-tiered paid/free approach, with an ad-driven browser site and a paid, premium app. "Rather than bemoan the small number of people who will pay, or freeze out the large number who won’t, the smart publisher will find ways to capture both audiences," he said. A couple of other tidbits from the study: John Paul Titlow of ReadWriteWeb said it's good news for publishers and e-businesses that tablets are drawing much more of people's undivided attention than desktops or laptops did, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM noted that people aren't sharing much of the news they're reading on their tablets, identifying social features as an area where news orgs could stand to improve on tablets. — WikiLeaks goes into hibernation: WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange announced this week that the site may be forced to close by the end of the year because what he called a "financial blockade" of major banks and credit card companies refusing to process donations for it. The blockade, begun last December after WikiLeaks began releasing its collection of diplomatic cables, has wiped out as much as 95% of the site's revenues, according to Assange, forcing it run on its reserves over the past several months. WikiLeaks has stopped processing leaks and shifted its resources to fundraising, including lawsuits and petitions it has filed in several countries to force the companies to process their donations. As Australia's the Age reported, its leaders hope to back up and running within a month. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor chastised news organizations for their lack of concern about the financial companies' action against WikiLeaks, saying the blockade is "a danger to everyone. It is a harbinger of a future where governments will find new leverage points to shut down the media they don't like." Gawker's Adrian Chen, on the other hand, posed some good questions on WikiLeaks' use of money this year, wondered how the group has used up most of its reserves (reported at $1.3 million at the end of 2010) without publishing any major new leaks. With WikiLeaks now in rebuilding mode, the Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve reflected on what the site has done for transparency and networked journalism, and her conclusion wasn't a flattering one. She called its experiment in enabling mass document leaking "an abysmal failure," noting that its most consequential leaks all seem to have come from one man — Bradley Manning — who's now in jail. "All those theoretical discussions of an anarchic new citizen press driven by anonymous file-sharing remain academic," she said. Reeve noted that leakers seem to be no safer now than they were a few years ago, and that goes for the ones who give information to traditional news organizations as well as WikiLeaks. Writing in the New York Times, data security expert Christopher Soghoian praised WikiLeaks for its security measures to protect its confidential sources while lamenting how poorly traditional news orgs do at the technical aspects of that job. It's probably not a coincidence, then, that news orgs' efforts at creating WikiLeaks-like leak submission programs have stalled, as Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported. — Murdoch & Co. hang on at News Corp.: The long-simmering outrage at News Corp. over its phone-hacking and circulation inflation scandals may have been expected by some to come to a head last Friday at the company's annual shareholder meeting, but there were relatively few fireworks to be seen. Rupert Murdoch made a defiant address to shareholders, describing the criticism of his company as "both understandable scrutiny and unfair attack." As expected, there were shareholders who called for Murdoch and his sons to step down, and a good number of critical questions parried by Murdoch, as paidContent documented. But the main business of the meeting remained unaffected: Murdoch and his sons were re-elected to the News Corp. board, though there was speculation that an "embarrassingly high" number of shareholders voted against them, according to the Independent. Meanwhile, former Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton testified before a committee of Parliament about the phone hacking and, predictably, gave a whole lot of "I don't recall"s and non-answers. — Reading roundup: This week was one of those weeks without many big stories in the future-of-journalism world, but with a lot of small ones. Here are a few of them: — As Megan Garber reported at the Lab this week, USA Today tried something new that we may see other news organizations doing in the future, licensing the data from the databases it produces on its website to commercial app developers. As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and the Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran pointed out, the real benefit of moves like this may be less about revenue and more about a creating a crowdsourced R&D department. — The death of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was the big news story late last week, and there were a couple of media-oriented angles. The big one was whether news orgs chose to show pictures or video of Gadhafi dead or being beaten. Poynter's Julie Moos found that U.S. newspapers were less likely than European ones to run the gruesome images. Those orgs that did run them ended up having to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Techdirt's Mike Masnick looked at the copyright issues involved with camera-phone footage of Gadhafi's beating. — After Jeff Jarvis and Evgeny Morozov traded blows over the past couple of weeks about Jarvis' new book, "Private Parts," the Lab's Megan Garber weighed in with a brilliant post on why books's ideas aren't truly read and discussed, and how to make it so that they are. Jarvis chimed in with some more ways to disrupt the book/conference cycle. — Gawker's Hamilton Nolan unearthed a sketchy linking-for-pay scheme from a small marketing company that claimed to have pulled it off with the Huffington Post and Business Insider. Those two orgs, naturally, issued denials. — Media/tech entrepreneurs Cody Brown and Katie Ray introduced another venture this week with Scroll, a tool intended to help publishers use a variety of more sophisticated web designs without knowing how to code them. The Lab had a profile of it. — In a masterful column, the New York Times' David Carr suggested that some of the Occupy Wall Street agitation should be directed toward newspaper chains, such as Gannett and the Tribune Co., who give their executives massive bonuses while laying off employees. — Finally, I've linked to a lot of "programming for journalists" guides and tipsheets here, but this one by Jonathan Richards at the Guardian may be the best I've seen at capturing and explaining the coding mentality in simple terms. Give it a read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com 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-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] The Guardian opens up its news agenda: The Guardian took a significant step in the evolution from a closed to open newsroom this week, allowing the public access to a live account of its internal list of planned news stories. In his announcement of the experiment, Dan Roberts said that it would start with a short trial and that it wouldn't include exclusives, embargoes or legally sensitive unconfirmed material. He also concluded with the rationale behind the bold move: "It seems there are more people wanting to know where their news comes from and how it is made. Painful as it might be for journalists to acknowledge, they might even have some improvements to make on the recipe too." Here's the newslist — yup, it looks pretty much like a simple version of standard newsroom budget. Roberts talked to Mashable about how helpful Twitter has been in pulling the plan off, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM praised the move as one other news organizations should emulate, arguing that not only does it benefit the news organization with more ideas and feedback, but that users are beginning to expect this kind of openness. Others were more skeptical. Elena Zak of 10,000 Words wondered if the Guardian's experiment is just a dressed-up version of the status quo, since the paper's editors are still maintaining all of the control over what gets published and what doesn't. And j-prof Andrew Cline took issue with Roberts' statement that this move is "a bit of a leap," pointing to a student news project that's opened its coverage plans via Facebook since it began. "It was a 'bit of a leap' 10 years ago. Today it’s what I’m teaching my journalism students," Cline wrote. — Circulation scandal at the Journal: News Corp.'s series of scandals reached the Wall Street Journal this week with a report that the Journal channeled money through a European company to buy copies of its own paper, in exchange for favorable coverage in the paper's pages. Just before the report surfaced, the man at the center of the scandal, a European executive at Journal parent company Dow Jones named Andrew Langhoff, resigned, and the whistleblower was fired in January. The Guardian, which broke the story, also reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation watchdog, will investigate the issue. The Journal itself confirmed many of the scandal's elements with its own story published the following day. Poynter's Steve Myers put together a good summary of the story and a quick roundup of the reaction, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review provided some more reporting on the Journal's coverage of its alleged circulation-inflating partner. Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that the Journal's favorable coverage was in a special section, where fewer people were likely to read it and take it seriously, and that even with the scandal, Wall Street Journal Europe's circulation only reached 75,000. Several observers pointed out, as Chittum put it, that News Corp. keeps showing a habit of covering up its misdeeds rather than being honest about them. The result of this is that everyone will assume the worst about any possible News Corp. scandal, according to Reuters' Felix Salmon. The next step, Salmon said, is for the scandals to spread beyond newspapers to Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, which would be truly disastrous for Rupert Murdoch. — Steve Jobs, devotion, and control: The tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs continued to pour in late last week after his death last Wednesday. Technology Review editor Jason Pontin continued with the theme of Jobs' love for creating products themselves, and tech guru Guy Kawasaki reflected on 12 business lessons he learned from Jobs. The most interesting of those lessons was that customers can't tell you what they need: "If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, 'Better, faster, and cheaper;—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using." Others reflected on the flood of appreciation for Jobs upon his death and the devotion of Apple fans: TechCrunch's MG Siegler talked about Jobs as "the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology, and John Biggs mused about Jobs as a pop-culture artist. At Fast Company, j-prof Adam Penenberg wrote about the way the uniqueness of Apple's products have had an addictive effect on us. Some commentary was more critical. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan pointed to Apple's track record of censorship and authoritarianism and Jobs' brusque personal style, and the Knight Center's Summer Harlow documented Jobs' often strained relationship with journalism. Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey went deeper into Jobs' controlling behavior toward journalists, noting, as Dan Gillmor put it in his piece, Apple's "uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." — New and old media within a protest movement: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the biggest ongoing stories in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks, featuring heavily in online discussion and garnering increasing coverage from traditional media. The story has some relevance for the future-of-news discussion as well: The New York Times' David Carr looked at the production of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, noting with some nostalgic pride the enduring role of newspapers in protest movements. News designer Mario Garcia was also surprised and pleased that so many young protesters would use various media, including a newspaper, as part of their movement's voice. The Times also examined another media tool being used by Occupy Wall Street protesters — Pastebin, a site created as a way for programmers to save and share code, but now being used as a (mostly) anonymous place to share protest information. Nitasha Tiku of BetaBeat pointed out that Pastebin was also used as a hangout for IRC, particularly for the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, well before Occupy Wall Street came on the scene. Meanwhile, Erika Fry of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the New York Police Department's efforts to issue and enforce press credentials at the protests, once again raising thorny questions about who is and isn't a journalist. — Reading roundup: It's been a somewhat slower week this week news-wise, but there were still a few other interesting issues that are worth keeping up on: — Facebook released its long-anticipated iPad app this week: The New York Times has some of the basic features (it's free), and All Things Digital detailed the process Facebook developers went through to get their own app and other Facebook-based apps onto Apple devices. — A few bits on news paywalls: PaidContent reported on Press+'s efforts to sell paywalls to college newspapers (Press+ is the name of the now-bought-out Journalism Online's paid-content system). Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explored how news organizations decide whether to take paywalls down for huge news events, and NetNewsCheck examined the market-wide effects of one newspaper's paywall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — We've heard a lot of talk about "Digital First" lately, particularly from folks within the Journal Register Co. Steve Yelvington, who works within fellow newspaper chain Morris Communications, offered a sharp, succinct explanation of what a Digital First transition entails. One key concept: accepting audience responsibility, not just news responsibility. — The Lab had a few fantastic pieces this week (no, Josh didn't tell me to write that) — j-profs Nikki Usher and Seth Lewis on what journalism can learn from open-source and maker culture, Megan Garber looking for lessons in failed Wikipedia-like efforts, and New York Times developer Jacob Harris went on a delightful rant against word clouds.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:41:19 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=903

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

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

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 16, 2011.] Paid and free, side by side: The Boston Globe became the latest news organization to institute an online paywall this week, but it did so in an unprecedented way that should be interesting to watch: The newspaper created a separate paid site, BostonGlobe.com, to run alongside its existing free site, Boston.com. PaidContent has the pertinent details: A single price (.99 a week), and Boston.com gets most of the breaking news and sports, while BostonGlobe.com gets most of the newspaper content. The Lab's Justin Ellis, meanwhile, has a look at the lab that designed it all. As the Globe told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, the two sites were designed with two different types of readers in mind: One who has a deep appreciation for in-depth journalism and likes to read stories start-to-finish, and another who reads news casually and briefly and may be more concerned about entertainment or basic information than journalism per se. The first thing that caught many people's attention was new site's design — simple, clean, and understated. Tech blogger John Gruber gave it a thumbs-up, and news design guru Mario Garcia called it "probably the most significant new website design in a long time." The Lab's Joshua Benton identified the biggest reasons it looks so clean: Far fewer links and ads. Benton (in the most comprehensive post on the new site) also emphasized a less noticeable but equally important aspect of BostonGlobe.com's design: It adjusts to fit just about any browser size, which eliminates the need for mobile apps, making life easier for programmers and, as j-prof Dan Kennedy noted at the Lab, a way around the cut of app fees required by Apple and others. If the Globe's people "have figured out a way not to share their hard-earned revenues with gatekeepers such as Apple and Amazon, then they will have truly performed a service for the news business — and for journalism," Kennedy said. Of course, the Globe could launch the most brilliantly conceived news site on the web, but it won't be a success unless enough people pay for it. Poynter's Sonderman (like Kennedy) was skeptical of their ability to do that, though as the Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen pointed out, the Globe's plan may be aimed as much at retaining print subscribers as making money off the web. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wondered if readers will find enough at BostonGlobe.com that's not at Boston.com to make the site worth their money. — The TechCrunch conflict and changing ethical standards: Last week's flap between AOL and TechCrunch over the tech site's ethical conflicts came to an official resolution on Monday, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington parted ways with AOL, the site's owner. But its full effects are going to be rippling for quite a while: Gawker's Ryan Tate called the fiasco a black eye for everyone involved, but especially AOL, which had approved Arrington's investments in some of the companies he covers just a few months ago. Fellow media mogul Barry Diller also ripped AOL's handling of the situation. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said that while he doesn't trust TechCrunch much personally, it's the audience's job to sort out their trust with the help of transparency, rather than traditional journalism's strictures. Others placed more of the blame on TechCrunch: Former Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons said TechCrunch's people should have expected this type of scenario when they sold to a big corporation, and media analyst Frederic Filloux said TechCrunch is a perfect example of the blogosphere's vulnerability to unchecked conflicts of interest. There was more fuel for those kinds of ethical concerns this week, as the winning company at TechCrunch's annual Disrupt competition was one that Arrington invests in. But Arrington had an ethical accusation of his own to make at the conference, pointing out that the New York Times invests in a tech venture capital fund which has put .5 million into GigaOM, a TechCrunch competitor. Poynter's Steve Myers detailed the Times' run-ins between the companies it invests in and the ones it covers (and its spotty disclosure about those connections), concluding that even if the conflict is less direct than in blogging, it's still worth examining more closely. As it plunged further into its battle with TechCrunch late last week, AOL was also reported to be talking with Yahoo, which recently fired its CEO, about a merger between the two Internet giants. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher said there's no way the deal would actually happen, and Wired's Tim Carmody called it a "spectacularly crazy idea" and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram agreed, while Business Insider reminded us that they said a year ago that AOL and Yahoo should merge. Meanwhile, the New York Times' David Carr homed in on the core problem that both companies are facing: The fact that people want information online from niche sites, not giant general-news portals. "As news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information," he wrote. — Facebook opens to subscribers: It hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as some of its other moves, but Facebook took another step in Twitter's direction this week by introducing the Subscribe Button, which allows users to see other people's (and groups') status updates without friending or becoming a fan of them. As GeekWire's Monica Guzman and many others noted, Facebook's "subscribe" looks a heck of a lot like Twitter's "follow." When asked about similar Google+ features at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a Facebook exec said it wasn't a response to Google+. Guzman said Facebook is putting down deeper roots by going beyond the limits of reciprocal friendship, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingrampinpointed the reason why this could end up being a massive change for Facebook: It's beginning to move Facebook from a symmetrical network to an asymmetrical one, which could fundamentally transform its dynamics. Still, Ingram said Twitter is much better oriented toward being an information network than Facebook is, even with a "Subscribe" button. The change could have particularly interesting implications for journalists, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explained in his brief outline of the feature. As he noted, it may eliminate the need for separate Facebook profiles and pages for journalists, and while Lost Remote's Cory Bergman said that should be a welcome change for journalists who were trying to manage both, he noted that shows and organizations may want to stick with pages. — News Corp.'s scandal widens: An update on the ongoing scandal enveloping News Corp.: A group of U.S. banks and investment funds that own shares in News Corp. expanded a lawsuit to include allegations of stealing, hacking, and anti-competitive behavior by two of the company's U.S. subsidiaries — an advertiser and a satellite TV hardware manufacturer. As the Washington Post's Erik Wemple noted, these are old cases, but they're getting fresh attention, and that's how scandals gain momentum. James Murdoch, the son of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, was also recalled to testify again before members of Britain's Parliament later this fall, facing new questions about the breadth of News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal. The Wall Street Journal examined the scandal's impact on the elder Murdoch's succession plan for the conglomerate, especially as it involves James. The company's executives also announced this week that they've found tens of thousands of documents that could shed more light on the phone hacking cases. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on this week: — The biggest news story this week, of course, is actually 10 years old: Here's a look at how newspapers marked the anniversary of 9/11, how news orgs used digital technology to tell the story, and a reflection on how 9/11 changed the media landscape. — Twitter introduced a new web analytics tool to measure Twitter's impact on websites. Here's an analysis from Mathew Ingram of GigaOM. — At an academic conference last weekend, Illinois j-prof Robert McChesney repeated his call for public funding for journalism. Here are a couple of good summaries of his talk from fellow j-profs Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida. — Finally, here's a relatively short but insightful two-part interview between two digital media luminaries, Henry Jenkins and Dan Gillmor, about media literacy, citizen journalism and Gillmor's latest book. Should make for a quick, thought-provoking weekend read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/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-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:43:08 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=860

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

This Week in Review: AOL’s big HuffPo buy, converging media in Egypt, and waiting on The Daily

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 5, 2011.] How right do we need to be on Twitter?: It's not particularly uncommon for false information to spread on Twitter under the guise of breaking news, and that's what happened late last week, when several journalists spread the rumor that CNN's Piers Morgan had been suspended from his show as part of the fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal, which turned out to be untrue. This misinformation, however, led to the most interesting discussion on Twitter and accuracy we've seen in a while. It started with Reuters' Felix Salmon, one of those who tweeted the Morgan rumor, defending the practice of quickly tweeting breaking news (false, in some cases) and then quickly correcting it. "Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false," he wrote. While news organizations' official accounts should stick to confirmed reports, individual reporters should be able to tweet unconfirmed information, Salmon said, as long as they attribute it properly and correct it quickly. Several writers objected to this line of reasoning: Fishbowl NY's Chris O'Shea said Salmon should be committed to tweeting true information because the fact that he's seen as a credible news source is the reason people follow him on Twitter in the first place. The Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman countered that Twitter is much closer to publishing than a newsroom meeting: "The reason people feel a bit of embarrassment after making a mistake on Twitter is precisely because it’s so public." And Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review said Salmon's strategy constitutes a reckless disregard for reporters' individual brand and reputation. Others were more sympathetic to Salmon's point. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pushed back against Rieder, arguing that news is a process, not just the publication of a finished product, and Twitter is part of that process. Salmon's editor at Reuters, Anthony DeRosa, who also tweeted the Morgan rumor, agreed with Salmon that Twitter is a newsroom, but vowed to be more careful to tweet verified information. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry, meanwhile, said that the dichotomy between being first and being right is a false one for journalists — and that journalists should strive for both. — A new tool for the new newsroom: Chartbeat, which does real-time analytics for websites, launched a news-oriented version of its tool last week called Newsbeat. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together a good overview of the service, which includes more detail about traffic trends and sources than Chartbeat. In an interview with GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, Chartbeat's Tony Haile answered the objection that this type of data will just lead to a "tyranny of the popular," arguing instead that the service may instead show journalists how they're underestimating their audiences, or how they can repackage news stories to make them more understandable to readers. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal provided an example from his own experience, noting that Chartbeat has shown that a surprising number of offbeat longform stories there generate big traffic. Newsbeat, he said, could help the mass of news sources fighting for attention online each find their sweet spot. "I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet," he said. At Wired, Tim Carmody emphasized the real-time nature of the information, noting that the need for that kind of information is growing as news organizations are increasingly editing and publishing in real time, too. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber was intrigued by the fact that Newsbeat offers individualized dashboards for each writer and editor's content. The feature, she reasoned, demonstrates the increased encouragement of entrepreneurialism within the modern newsroom: "Increasingly, the gates of production are swinging open to journalists throughout, if not fully across, the newsroom. That’s a good thing. It’s also a big thing. And Newsbeat is reflecting it." — A truly daily tablet publication: Seems almost every other week we have a new entry into the tablet news market; this week it's AOL, which launched its daily tablet magazine Editions this week. All Things Digital and Poynter have good overviews of what the new publication is: Notably, it's delivered to your tablet just once a day (at the time of your choosing), with a set ending page, and without any updates. It's big on personalization, tailoring news to each user a bit like Pandora, and it also includes some local news and, as Poynter noted, primarily aims to recreate the print experience (a fake mailing label, even!). To the people behind Editions, its lack of updates and finite, print-like interface are assets: As one of them told the New York Times, "For a lot of people, [continual updating] becomes oppressive. This is not tapping you on the shoulder all the time." But at TechCrunch (which is also owned by AOL), Erick Schonfeld was skeptical, asserting that if he feels like he's getting day-old news on Editions, he'll just stick to the web. "News apps need to be as current as the Web. Those are just table stakes," he wrote. Mashable's Lauren Indvik, on the other hand, was rather impressed, saying the finiteness of the magazine provides a nice contrast to the unruliness of the web. — The scandal goes stateside: A couple of updates on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal: The story is beginning to migrate across the Atlantic, as attention begins to shift toward several accusations of spying made years ago against News Corp. holdings in the United States. Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke this story open earlier this summer, was reportedly in the States this week investigating News Corp. At New York magazine, Frank Rich urged Americans to look more closely into Murdoch's behavior here: "We’ve become so inured to Murdoch tactics over the years—and so many people in public life have been frightened, silenced, co-opted, or even seduced by them—that we have minimized his impact exactly the way his publicists hoped we would, downgrading News Corp. misbehavior merely to tabloid vulgarity and right-wing attack-dog politics." Two other notes: The News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is surveying subscribers about its image in light of the phone hacking scandal, and the American Journalism Review's John Morton said that for all his faults, Rupert Murdoch's heart is in newspapers, something he appreciates. — Reading roundup: Several things journalists and educators might find useful this week: — Some smaller papers in the Lee Enterprises chain are going to be trying out metered-model online pay plans, which include a small charge for the website even for print subscribers. Poynter's Rick Edmonds explained why. And at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at how the economics of circulation and advertising are moving online. — There are still a few places where print is still king — among the wealthy, for instance, as data from this Ad Age survey show. — A few great how-to's and suggestions: Journalism.co.uk's SEO primer for journalists; Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams' six proposals for journalism education; and a quick guide to data journalism from the Guardian. — Finally, media analyst Alan Mutter made a strong case for why newspapers' business model will never stabilize and urged them to begin "intelligently, and speedily, de-stabilizing their enterprises." It's a case that's been made many times before, but one that probably needs to be heard again.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/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

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

]]> [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-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 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-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] The Guardian opens up its news agenda: The Guardian took a significant step in the evolution from a closed to open newsroom this week, allowing the public access to a live account of its internal list of planned news stories. In his announcement of the experiment, Dan Roberts said that it would start with a short trial and that it wouldn't include exclusives, embargoes or legally sensitive unconfirmed material. He also concluded with the rationale behind the bold move: "It seems there are more people wanting to know where their news comes from and how it is made. Painful as it might be for journalists to acknowledge, they might even have some improvements to make on the recipe too." Here's the newslist — yup, it looks pretty much like a simple version of standard newsroom budget. Roberts talked to Mashable about how helpful Twitter has been in pulling the plan off, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM praised the move as one other news organizations should emulate, arguing that not only does it benefit the news organization with more ideas and feedback, but that users are beginning to expect this kind of openness. Others were more skeptical. Elena Zak of 10,000 Words wondered if the Guardian's experiment is just a dressed-up version of the status quo, since the paper's editors are still maintaining all of the control over what gets published and what doesn't. And j-prof Andrew Cline took issue with Roberts' statement that this move is "a bit of a leap," pointing to a student news project that's opened its coverage plans via Facebook since it began. "It was a 'bit of a leap' 10 years ago. Today it’s what I’m teaching my journalism students," Cline wrote. — Circulation scandal at the Journal: News Corp.'s series of scandals reached the Wall Street Journal this week with a report that the Journal channeled money through a European company to buy copies of its own paper, in exchange for favorable coverage in the paper's pages. Just before the report surfaced, the man at the center of the scandal, a European executive at Journal parent company Dow Jones named Andrew Langhoff, resigned, and the whistleblower was fired in January. The Guardian, which broke the story, also reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation watchdog, will investigate the issue. The Journal itself confirmed many of the scandal's elements with its own story published the following day. Poynter's Steve Myers put together a good summary of the story and a quick roundup of the reaction, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review provided some more reporting on the Journal's coverage of its alleged circulation-inflating partner. Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that the Journal's favorable coverage was in a special section, where fewer people were likely to read it and take it seriously, and that even with the scandal, Wall Street Journal Europe's circulation only reached 75,000. Several observers pointed out, as Chittum put it, that News Corp. keeps showing a habit of covering up its misdeeds rather than being honest about them. The result of this is that everyone will assume the worst about any possible News Corp. scandal, according to Reuters' Felix Salmon. The next step, Salmon said, is for the scandals to spread beyond newspapers to Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, which would be truly disastrous for Rupert Murdoch. — Steve Jobs, devotion, and control: The tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs continued to pour in late last week after his death last Wednesday. Technology Review editor Jason Pontin continued with the theme of Jobs' love for creating products themselves, and tech guru Guy Kawasaki reflected on 12 business lessons he learned from Jobs. The most interesting of those lessons was that customers can't tell you what they need: "If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, 'Better, faster, and cheaper;—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using." Others reflected on the flood of appreciation for Jobs upon his death and the devotion of Apple fans: TechCrunch's MG Siegler talked about Jobs as "the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology, and John Biggs mused about Jobs as a pop-culture artist. At Fast Company, j-prof Adam Penenberg wrote about the way the uniqueness of Apple's products have had an addictive effect on us. Some commentary was more critical. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan pointed to Apple's track record of censorship and authoritarianism and Jobs' brusque personal style, and the Knight Center's Summer Harlow documented Jobs' often strained relationship with journalism. Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey went deeper into Jobs' controlling behavior toward journalists, noting, as Dan Gillmor put it in his piece, Apple's "uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." — New and old media within a protest movement: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the biggest ongoing stories in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks, featuring heavily in online discussion and garnering increasing coverage from traditional media. The story has some relevance for the future-of-news discussion as well: The New York Times' David Carr looked at the production of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, noting with some nostalgic pride the enduring role of newspapers in protest movements. News designer Mario Garcia was also surprised and pleased that so many young protesters would use various media, including a newspaper, as part of their movement's voice. The Times also examined another media tool being used by Occupy Wall Street protesters — Pastebin, a site created as a way for programmers to save and share code, but now being used as a (mostly) anonymous place to share protest information. Nitasha Tiku of BetaBeat pointed out that Pastebin was also used as a hangout for IRC, particularly for the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, well before Occupy Wall Street came on the scene. Meanwhile, Erika Fry of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the New York Police Department's efforts to issue and enforce press credentials at the protests, once again raising thorny questions about who is and isn't a journalist. — Reading roundup: It's been a somewhat slower week this week news-wise, but there were still a few other interesting issues that are worth keeping up on: — Facebook released its long-anticipated iPad app this week: The New York Times has some of the basic features (it's free), and All Things Digital detailed the process Facebook developers went through to get their own app and other Facebook-based apps onto Apple devices. — A few bits on news paywalls: PaidContent reported on Press+'s efforts to sell paywalls to college newspapers (Press+ is the name of the now-bought-out Journalism Online's paid-content system). Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explored how news organizations decide whether to take paywalls down for huge news events, and NetNewsCheck examined the market-wide effects of one newspaper's paywall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — We've heard a lot of talk about "Digital First" lately, particularly from folks within the Journal Register Co. Steve Yelvington, who works within fellow newspaper chain Morris Communications, offered a sharp, succinct explanation of what a Digital First transition entails. One key concept: accepting audience responsibility, not just news responsibility. — The Lab had a few fantastic pieces this week (no, Josh didn't tell me to write that) — j-profs Nikki Usher and Seth Lewis on what journalism can learn from open-source and maker culture, Megan Garber looking for lessons in failed Wikipedia-like efforts, and New York Times developer Jacob Harris went on a delightful rant against word clouds.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:41:19 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=903

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

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

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

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