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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/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-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/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:51:38 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=834

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This Week in Review: The Guardian goes digital first, local journalism’s future, and preserving news stories

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 3, 2011.] The Times' new top dog: There's no question what the top story is this week: For the first time in eight years, the U.S.' most prominent news organization, The New York Times, will have a new executive editor. And for the first time ever, that editor will be a woman. The Times announced yesterday that Bill Keller will be stepping down from the job to be a columnist, and managing editor Jill Abramson will move into the top spot, with former Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet taking her current position. To hear the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz tell it, the timing of the move was a surprise, but Abramson's appointment was not. So who is Jill Abramson, and what does her appointment mean for the future of digital news at the Times? This New York magazine profile from last year and Adweek backgrounder give a good basic picture — she's a longtime Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who's been at the Times for 14 years, and she's known as a blunt, critical editor. As for her webbiness, the Lab's Joshua Benton looked briefly through her history to find signs of a generally positive attitude toward digital media (she led the integration of the Times' print and web newsrooms, and spent five months immersing herself in the Times' digital side last year). Poynter found some 2010 quotes in which Abramson was pro-multiplatform news and anti-citizen journalism. Abramson also talked to Ad Age about breaking down a print-based newsroom publishing culture and about her commitment to the Times' paywall. We also learned that Abramson doesn't plan to continue Keller's feud with Arianna Huffington, and has a "fervent belief" in narrative nonfiction writing. And she got the seal of approval from former Times social media editor Jennifer Preston, who tweeted: "For all of you wondering about Jill Abramson and the Web? Jill gets it. And she's fearless. We're lucky." Then, of course, there's Keller. In various interviews, he talked about why he left now — because he wanted to hand the job off when things were going well, and he wanted to make sure the paywall was instituted and the newsroom integrated first. He also said the job switched from being mostly about journalism to being mostly about business, and talked about how brutal it was to go through the recession at the Times. The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder praised his ability to keep the Times in relatively good shapethrough such a tough stretch. As for what's next, Reuters' Felix Salmon said one of Abramson's primary tasks will be making the Times a more transparent place, and Poynter's Jill Geisler said her promotion could help push other newsrooms to move women into positions of leadership. — How necessary is the news article?: This week's most interesting discussion grew out of last week's devastating tornado in Joplin, Missouri — specifically, New York Times writer Brian Stelter's reporting of the story from Joplin on Twitter. On his blog, Stelter gave a blow-by-blow of his reporting there, concluding, "I think my best reporting was on Twitter." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram praised Stelter's work as evidence that the Times is becoming more open to the open web, and Rowan j-prof Mark Berkey-Gerard talked about why it made a great example for journalism students. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis used Stelter's Twitter reporting to argue that the article is no longer the core journalistic product, but a byproduct of the journalistic process. "When digital comes first and print last, then the article is something you need to put together to fill the paper; it’s not the goal of the entire process," he wrote. "The process is the goal of the process: keeping the public constantly informed." The Sacramento Press' Ben Ilfeld took the point further, calling the article an "antiquated by product not of good journalism, but a quickly fading era." And Jonathan Glick of Sulia said the article is being divorced into quick, mobile-friendly news nuggets and analytical, long-form journalism. Mathew Ingram tweaked Jarvis' argument, saying that while Twitter is critical in the reporting process, it hardly renders articles unnecessary. (Jarvis responded by asserting that Ingram was mischaracterizing his argument.) South Carolina j-prof Doug Fisher tried to reconcile the two positions, pointing out that what journalists call a news "story" isn't really one: Instead, it's a "factoid exposition that tries to impose structure on often unstructured events." And Jarvis looked for a different name for "long-form journalism" — something that doesn't imply that length equals intelligence. — Hackers target PBS: When various corporations and government entities tightened the screws on WikiLeaks last December, the loose online activism collective Anonymous descended on those groups' sites with a series of attacks. This week, a different online group turned their attacks toward a news organization for the first time in defense of WikiLeaks. The new group, which calls itself LulzSec, hacked the PBS website last weekend in response to a Frontline documentary on WikiLeaks, publishing thousands of passwords and posting a fake story on the PBS homepage about Tupac being found alive. Then, a couple of days later, LulzSec hacked PBS' site again. PBS NewsHour found ways to get their news out without their website, posting to Tumblr and talking to viewers on Facebook. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman used the opportunity to provide a helpful list of tips for news organizations on preparing for a potential hack. One of LulzSec's members talked to Parmy Olson of Forbes about the attack, saying that while they certainly weren't pleased by the documentary, their primary goal was entertainment. That's not how it was seen at PBS, though. The New York Times' Brian Stelter reported that the attacks were perceived at PBS as "attempts to chill independent journalism." "This is what repressive governments do," Frontline executive producer David Fanning told him. "This is what people who don’t want information out in the world do — they try to shut the presses." NewsHour reporter Judy Woodruff expressed a similar sentiment in a column on PBS' (since restored) site. — An iPad dissenter: Magazine publishers have been among the most eager media organizations to jump onto the iPad, but one publisher, Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner, pushed back against that enthusiasm this week. Wenner said tablet editions aren't particularly useful for magazine readers, and not cost-effective for publishers, either. It'll be a generation or two before the shift from to tablets is decisive, he said. Wenner advised publishers to be attuned to changes in technology, but cautioned that "to rush to throw away your magazine business and move it on the iPad is just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear." Forbes' Jeff Bercovici ridiculed Wenner's statements, recounting his history of web aversion and the way it's hurt his magazine. Advertising Age's Nat Ives, who conducted the Wenner interview, pointed out elsewhere that magazine readers' demographics aren't exactly improving. Elsewhere in the world of the iPad: Fox News and the San Francisco Chronicle launched their apps, the New York Times offered a steep iPad discount for some people already getting free web subscriptions, and Nomad Editions is working on at least seven more new iPad-based magazines. But a Nielsen Norman Group study found that many iPad app designers are confusing users by requiring gestures that are too subtle, resulting in apps that can be tougher to use than the organization's own website. — Web filters and broadening our horizons: One other thought-provoking conversation worth noting: It started last week with a New York Times column by MoveOn.org's Eli Pariser, who argued that while the modern digital media environment has broken down the old system of traditional-media gatekeepers, it's set up a new set of gatekeepers in its place — not people this time, but code. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing reviewed the book on which Pariser's column was based, and while he agreed with some of Pariser's premises, he countered that Pariser underestimates the power of our personally controlled filtering devices to put a check on some of the online manipulation he describes. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, on the other hand, argued that our problem is not having too many filters, but not having enough. Information overload, he said, is a greater danger right now than hyper-personalization. At Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody said that what Pariser's concerned about is not so much narrowing of opinions as narrowing of interests. That's a new-media incarnation of an old problem, he said, and the web has the ability to help solve it too: "we’re often unaware of what’s happening in the next room, where there is frequently plenty of useful stuff that we could port into our own special areas of interest. We need to make sure we’re taking advantage of the web’s built-in ability to move laterally." — Reading roundup: A few smaller items to keep an eye on this week: — A couple of leftovers from the discussion on Twitter over the past few weeks: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal on Twitter's oral culture, media consultant Frederic Filloux on why Bill Keller's criticism of Twitter (and Twitter for itself, for that matter) doesn't carry much weight, and the Lab's Megan Garber with a fantastic post on why discourse on Twitter is so difficult to classify. — Two pieces with some great tips on engagement: Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter with some doable steps for journalists, and the Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry with advice on local engagement on Twitter. — Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt always makes headlines when he gives public interviews like he did at the All Things Digital conference this week, and the Lab's Joshua Benton focused on one aspect that could be of particular for news organizations: Google's efforts to answer your questions before you even get to the search stage. — Two great pieces to leave you with: The always-thoughtful Jonathan Stray threw out a few ideas on developing collaborative systems for investigative journalism, and Toronto Star vet Judy Sims shared a speech she gave with nine principles for newspapers to follow to adapt to the abundant-media era.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:51:39 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=806

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

This Week in Review: New business models and traffic drivers in online news, and wrangling over app ads

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 6, 2011.] Twitter as breaking-news system: This week's big news is obvious: American forces killed Osama bin Laden on Monday (Sunday for most Westerners) in a raid of his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But you already knew that, and how exactly you found out is the first angle I want to look at. The news blew up on Twitter and Facebook late Sunday night after the White House announced President Obama would be addressing the nation. The ensuing frenzy set a record for the highest volume of sustained activity on Twitter, with an average of 3,000 tweets per second for about three hours. While most Americans first got the news from TV, about a fifth of young people found out online. That led to another round of celebration of Twitter as the emerging source for big breaking news — Business Insider's Matt Rosoff called the story Twitter's CNN moment and said Twitter was "faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there." PR guru Brian Solis described Twitter as "a perfect beast for committing acts of journalism," and University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida said it's becoming routine to see Twitter as the first option for breaking news coverage. Others pushed back against that praise: Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco argued that everyone on Twitter was still waiting for confirmation from government officials and the mainstream media, and Dan Mitchell of SF Weekly said that most of the people tweeting the news were from traditional media anyway. The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder said the aide who broke the story on Twitter wasn't doing journalism, but just passing on a rumor. And Engadget vet Joshua Topolsky said the Twitter buzz probably says more about our need to tell others we got to the news first than it does about Twitter. Several folks staked out a spot between the two positions. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld said Twitter doesn't supplant traditional media, but it does amplify it and drive people to it. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram advised us to think about it not in terms of competition between old and new media, but as part of a news ecosystem: "it’s not really about Twitter or Facebook; it’s about the power of the network." Elsewhere, media analyst Dan Gillmor compared this story to how the 9/11 news broke, GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham classified the seven stages of breaking news on Twitter, and Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan looked at the way Google responded to the story. Three other mini-stories within the digital aspect of the Bin Laden story: First, regarding traditional media outlets' online efforts, former Guardian digital chief Emily Bell wrote a fantastic piece about how live news coverage is the great challenge of our time for news orgs, the Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles critiqued the performance of mobile news sites, and the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones ripped some news iPad apps for being slow with the story. Second, there was plenty of discussion about the remarkable story of Pakistani programmer Sohaib Athar, who live-tweeted the raid without knowing it. Poynter's Steve Myers went meta with the account of how we found out about him, revealing some interesting examples of how information travels through a network like Twitter. He then defended Athar as a citizen journalist. And third, the Atlantic's Megan McArdle explained how a quotation got misattributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and then went viral, and Frederic Lardinois of NewsGrange mused about the difficulty of social media corrections. — Osama and the Times' pay wall: While we've been focusing on the digital media side of things so far, Bin Laden's death was the type of massive story that traditional news organizations go into overdrive on, too. Poynter and the Columbia Journalism Review have great looks at how news orgs played the story in print and online, and we got some behind-the-scenes glimpses at how the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, CNN, and other mainstream journalists put together reports on such quick deadlines. The Times made an interesting decision in the wake of the story not to lift its pay wall/gate/fence for news on Bin Laden's death, even though it had previously expressed a willingness to allow free access for big stories. The Lab's Megan Garber asked a number of questions about that issue — who makes that decision? And if this isn't a huge story, what is? — and noted that the fact that it was the beginning of the month and many users' meters had just been reset played into the decision. Meanwhile, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times criticized the cheerleading tone of TV news' coverage, and Slate's Jack Shafer called out some of the inaccuracies in news stories on Bin Laden's death. — Giving reporters social-media leeway: We saw a case study in contrasting newsroom social media policies, starting when Bloomberg' guidelines were leaked to eMedia Vitals last week. It encouraged reporters to use Twitter, with several restrictions listed under one strong caveat: "Ask questions first. Tweet later." A couple of days later, John Paton of the Journal Register Co. posted his own company's social media policy. It was blank — implying that the company doesn't put any explicit restrictions on what or how employees can post. Techdirt's Mike Masnick praised Paton's philosophy: "These things are developing quickly, and for people to find out how to use these tools most efficiently and effectively, they need to feel free to experiment and do whatever needs to be done." That prompted GigaOM's Mathew Ingram to give his own social media advice for journalists, telling them to talk to people, link, retweet, reply when spoken to, admit when they're wrong and be human — but not too human. Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, defined online engagement in terms of outreach, conversation, and collaboration. — Publishers begin to jump in with Apple: A couple of big media-on-iPad developments this week: Time Inc. reached a deal with Apple to allow magazine subscribers to get iPad apps for free, and Hearst became one of the first major publishers to agree to offer subscriptions within iPad (which means Apple's getting that 30% cut), though Advertising Age's Nat Ives wondered if Condé Nast will beat Hearst to the punch. The British newspaper the Telegraph also launched an iPad edition, and the Guardian's Stuart Dredge noted that both the Telegraph and Hearst are asking customers to share their personal data with them (Apple already gets customer data), and the Telegraph is giving an incentive to them to do so. Meanwhile, the company Yudu has launched some sort of service that will somehow allow publishers to evade Apple's 30% in-app subscription cut and apparently got Apple's approval. (As you can tell, details are sketchy at this point.) Elsewhere in news on the iPad, News Corp. said it's lost million on The Daily this quarter, which has reportedly gotten 800,000 downloads. Former Marketwatch CEO Larry Kramer said The Daily is gradually getting better, though. — Pardon AOL's dust: Arianna Huffington keeps on cleaning house at AOL, with a handful of new changes each week. This week: AOL News was folded into the Huffington Post, and Patch announced they're launching Patch Latino sites in California and unveiled the hyperlocal blogging network for which it's been recruiting volunteers for the past couple of weeks. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported that AOL is continuing to pour millions of dollars into Patch and expects to lose money on the site this year. Even if Patch works journalistically, Mathew Ingram said, that doesn't mean it'll make any business sense. The Next Web's Alex Wilhelm warned of the homogenization threatened by the AOL content empire and NPR's On the Media debated whether the Huffington Post is good for journalism. Amid the hand-wringing, Lauren Rabaino of 10,000 pointed out five good things Patch sites are doing, including transparency and accountability by editors. — Reading roundup: Believe it or not, people in media circles talked about things this week that didn't have to do with Osama bin Laden or AOL. Here are a few of them: — Marco Arment's post last week about his successful experiments in charging for Instapaper turned into an interesting discussion about creating a freemium or "business class" for news. Here's Frederic Filloux, Oliver Reichenstein, and Mathew Ingram. — Another noteworthy conversation that sprung week: Scott Rosenberg, Dave Winer, and Amy Gahran on why journalists should be wary of Facebook — because eventually, as Rosenberg said, "it’s not the public sphere, not in the way the Internet itself is. It’s just a company." — The Wall Street Journal became the latest news org to launch a platform modeled after the WikiLeaks anonymous leaking concept, with SafeHouse. The Atlantic has plenty of details. — Finally, two useful sets of tips: One from Poynter's Julie Moos about news blogging from filling in for Jim Romenesko for a week, and the other from TBD's Steve Buttry on possible revenue streams for newspapers.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/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-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/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:51:38 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=834

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This Week in Review: The Guardian goes digital first, local journalism’s future, and preserving news stories

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 3, 2011.] The Times' new top dog: There's no question what the top story is this week: For the first time in eight years, the U.S.' most prominent news organization, The New York Times, will have a new executive editor. And for the first time ever, that editor will be a woman. The Times announced yesterday that Bill Keller will be stepping down from the job to be a columnist, and managing editor Jill Abramson will move into the top spot, with former Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet taking her current position. To hear the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz tell it, the timing of the move was a surprise, but Abramson's appointment was not. So who is Jill Abramson, and what does her appointment mean for the future of digital news at the Times? This New York magazine profile from last year and Adweek backgrounder give a good basic picture — she's a longtime Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who's been at the Times for 14 years, and she's known as a blunt, critical editor. As for her webbiness, the Lab's Joshua Benton looked briefly through her history to find signs of a generally positive attitude toward digital media (she led the integration of the Times' print and web newsrooms, and spent five months immersing herself in the Times' digital side last year). Poynter found some 2010 quotes in which Abramson was pro-multiplatform news and anti-citizen journalism. Abramson also talked to Ad Age about breaking down a print-based newsroom publishing culture and about her commitment to the Times' paywall. We also learned that Abramson doesn't plan to continue Keller's feud with Arianna Huffington, and has a "fervent belief" in narrative nonfiction writing. And she got the seal of approval from former Times social media editor Jennifer Preston, who tweeted: "For all of you wondering about Jill Abramson and the Web? Jill gets it. And she's fearless. We're lucky." Then, of course, there's Keller. In various interviews, he talked about why he left now — because he wanted to hand the job off when things were going well, and he wanted to make sure the paywall was instituted and the newsroom integrated first. He also said the job switched from being mostly about journalism to being mostly about business, and talked about how brutal it was to go through the recession at the Times. The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder praised his ability to keep the Times in relatively good shapethrough such a tough stretch. As for what's next, Reuters' Felix Salmon said one of Abramson's primary tasks will be making the Times a more transparent place, and Poynter's Jill Geisler said her promotion could help push other newsrooms to move women into positions of leadership. — How necessary is the news article?: This week's most interesting discussion grew out of last week's devastating tornado in Joplin, Missouri — specifically, New York Times writer Brian Stelter's reporting of the story from Joplin on Twitter. On his blog, Stelter gave a blow-by-blow of his reporting there, concluding, "I think my best reporting was on Twitter." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram praised Stelter's work as evidence that the Times is becoming more open to the open web, and Rowan j-prof Mark Berkey-Gerard talked about why it made a great example for journalism students. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis used Stelter's Twitter reporting to argue that the article is no longer the core journalistic product, but a byproduct of the journalistic process. "When digital comes first and print last, then the article is something you need to put together to fill the paper; it’s not the goal of the entire process," he wrote. "The process is the goal of the process: keeping the public constantly informed." The Sacramento Press' Ben Ilfeld took the point further, calling the article an "antiquated by product not of good journalism, but a quickly fading era." And Jonathan Glick of Sulia said the article is being divorced into quick, mobile-friendly news nuggets and analytical, long-form journalism. Mathew Ingram tweaked Jarvis' argument, saying that while Twitter is critical in the reporting process, it hardly renders articles unnecessary. (Jarvis responded by asserting that Ingram was mischaracterizing his argument.) South Carolina j-prof Doug Fisher tried to reconcile the two positions, pointing out that what journalists call a news "story" isn't really one: Instead, it's a "factoid exposition that tries to impose structure on often unstructured events." And Jarvis looked for a different name for "long-form journalism" — something that doesn't imply that length equals intelligence. — Hackers target PBS: When various corporations and government entities tightened the screws on WikiLeaks last December, the loose online activism collective Anonymous descended on those groups' sites with a series of attacks. This week, a different online group turned their attacks toward a news organization for the first time in defense of WikiLeaks. The new group, which calls itself LulzSec, hacked the PBS website last weekend in response to a Frontline documentary on WikiLeaks, publishing thousands of passwords and posting a fake story on the PBS homepage about Tupac being found alive. Then, a couple of days later, LulzSec hacked PBS' site again. PBS NewsHour found ways to get their news out without their website, posting to Tumblr and talking to viewers on Facebook. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman used the opportunity to provide a helpful list of tips for news organizations on preparing for a potential hack. One of LulzSec's members talked to Parmy Olson of Forbes about the attack, saying that while they certainly weren't pleased by the documentary, their primary goal was entertainment. That's not how it was seen at PBS, though. The New York Times' Brian Stelter reported that the attacks were perceived at PBS as "attempts to chill independent journalism." "This is what repressive governments do," Frontline executive producer David Fanning told him. "This is what people who don’t want information out in the world do — they try to shut the presses." NewsHour reporter Judy Woodruff expressed a similar sentiment in a column on PBS' (since restored) site. — An iPad dissenter: Magazine publishers have been among the most eager media organizations to jump onto the iPad, but one publisher, Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner, pushed back against that enthusiasm this week. Wenner said tablet editions aren't particularly useful for magazine readers, and not cost-effective for publishers, either. It'll be a generation or two before the shift from to tablets is decisive, he said. Wenner advised publishers to be attuned to changes in technology, but cautioned that "to rush to throw away your magazine business and move it on the iPad is just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear." Forbes' Jeff Bercovici ridiculed Wenner's statements, recounting his history of web aversion and the way it's hurt his magazine. Advertising Age's Nat Ives, who conducted the Wenner interview, pointed out elsewhere that magazine readers' demographics aren't exactly improving. Elsewhere in the world of the iPad: Fox News and the San Francisco Chronicle launched their apps, the New York Times offered a steep iPad discount for some people already getting free web subscriptions, and Nomad Editions is working on at least seven more new iPad-based magazines. But a Nielsen Norman Group study found that many iPad app designers are confusing users by requiring gestures that are too subtle, resulting in apps that can be tougher to use than the organization's own website. — Web filters and broadening our horizons: One other thought-provoking conversation worth noting: It started last week with a New York Times column by MoveOn.org's Eli Pariser, who argued that while the modern digital media environment has broken down the old system of traditional-media gatekeepers, it's set up a new set of gatekeepers in its place — not people this time, but code. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing reviewed the book on which Pariser's column was based, and while he agreed with some of Pariser's premises, he countered that Pariser underestimates the power of our personally controlled filtering devices to put a check on some of the online manipulation he describes. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, on the other hand, argued that our problem is not having too many filters, but not having enough. Information overload, he said, is a greater danger right now than hyper-personalization. At Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody said that what Pariser's concerned about is not so much narrowing of opinions as narrowing of interests. That's a new-media incarnation of an old problem, he said, and the web has the ability to help solve it too: "we’re often unaware of what’s happening in the next room, where there is frequently plenty of useful stuff that we could port into our own special areas of interest. We need to make sure we’re taking advantage of the web’s built-in ability to move laterally." — Reading roundup: A few smaller items to keep an eye on this week: — A couple of leftovers from the discussion on Twitter over the past few weeks: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal on Twitter's oral culture, media consultant Frederic Filloux on why Bill Keller's criticism of Twitter (and Twitter for itself, for that matter) doesn't carry much weight, and the Lab's Megan Garber with a fantastic post on why discourse on Twitter is so difficult to classify. — Two pieces with some great tips on engagement: Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter with some doable steps for journalists, and the Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry with advice on local engagement on Twitter. — Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt always makes headlines when he gives public interviews like he did at the All Things Digital conference this week, and the Lab's Joshua Benton focused on one aspect that could be of particular for news organizations: Google's efforts to answer your questions before you even get to the search stage. — Two great pieces to leave you with: The always-thoughtful Jonathan Stray threw out a few ideas on developing collaborative systems for investigative journalism, and Toronto Star vet Judy Sims shared a speech she gave with nine principles for newspapers to follow to adapt to the abundant-media era.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:51:39 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=806

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

This Week in Review: New business models and traffic drivers in online news, and wrangling over app ads

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 6, 2011.] Twitter as breaking-news system: This week's big news is obvious: American forces killed Osama bin Laden on Monday (Sunday for most Westerners) in a raid of his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But you already knew that, and how exactly you found out is the first angle I want to look at. The news blew up on Twitter and Facebook late Sunday night after the White House announced President Obama would be addressing the nation. The ensuing frenzy set a record for the highest volume of sustained activity on Twitter, with an average of 3,000 tweets per second for about three hours. While most Americans first got the news from TV, about a fifth of young people found out online. That led to another round of celebration of Twitter as the emerging source for big breaking news — Business Insider's Matt Rosoff called the story Twitter's CNN moment and said Twitter was "faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there." PR guru Brian Solis described Twitter as "a perfect beast for committing acts of journalism," and University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida said it's becoming routine to see Twitter as the first option for breaking news coverage. Others pushed back against that praise: Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco argued that everyone on Twitter was still waiting for confirmation from government officials and the mainstream media, and Dan Mitchell of SF Weekly said that most of the people tweeting the news were from traditional media anyway. The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder said the aide who broke the story on Twitter wasn't doing journalism, but just passing on a rumor. And Engadget vet Joshua Topolsky said the Twitter buzz probably says more about our need to tell others we got to the news first than it does about Twitter. Several folks staked out a spot between the two positions. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld said Twitter doesn't supplant traditional media, but it does amplify it and drive people to it. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram advised us to think about it not in terms of competition between old and new media, but as part of a news ecosystem: "it’s not really about Twitter or Facebook; it’s about the power of the network." Elsewhere, media analyst Dan Gillmor compared this story to how the 9/11 news broke, GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham classified the seven stages of breaking news on Twitter, and Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan looked at the way Google responded to the story. Three other mini-stories within the digital aspect of the Bin Laden story: First, regarding traditional media outlets' online efforts, former Guardian digital chief Emily Bell wrote a fantastic piece about how live news coverage is the great challenge of our time for news orgs, the Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles critiqued the performance of mobile news sites, and the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones ripped some news iPad apps for being slow with the story. Second, there was plenty of discussion about the remarkable story of Pakistani programmer Sohaib Athar, who live-tweeted the raid without knowing it. Poynter's Steve Myers went meta with the account of how we found out about him, revealing some interesting examples of how information travels through a network like Twitter. He then defended Athar as a citizen journalist. And third, the Atlantic's Megan McArdle explained how a quotation got misattributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and then went viral, and Frederic Lardinois of NewsGrange mused about the difficulty of social media corrections. — Osama and the Times' pay wall: While we've been focusing on the digital media side of things so far, Bin Laden's death was the type of massive story that traditional news organizations go into overdrive on, too. Poynter and the Columbia Journalism Review have great looks at how news orgs played the story in print and online, and we got some behind-the-scenes glimpses at how the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, CNN, and other mainstream journalists put together reports on such quick deadlines. The Times made an interesting decision in the wake of the story not to lift its pay wall/gate/fence for news on Bin Laden's death, even though it had previously expressed a willingness to allow free access for big stories. The Lab's Megan Garber asked a number of questions about that issue — who makes that decision? And if this isn't a huge story, what is? — and noted that the fact that it was the beginning of the month and many users' meters had just been reset played into the decision. Meanwhile, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times criticized the cheerleading tone of TV news' coverage, and Slate's Jack Shafer called out some of the inaccuracies in news stories on Bin Laden's death. — Giving reporters social-media leeway: We saw a case study in contrasting newsroom social media policies, starting when Bloomberg' guidelines were leaked to eMedia Vitals last week. It encouraged reporters to use Twitter, with several restrictions listed under one strong caveat: "Ask questions first. Tweet later." A couple of days later, John Paton of the Journal Register Co. posted his own company's social media policy. It was blank — implying that the company doesn't put any explicit restrictions on what or how employees can post. Techdirt's Mike Masnick praised Paton's philosophy: "These things are developing quickly, and for people to find out how to use these tools most efficiently and effectively, they need to feel free to experiment and do whatever needs to be done." That prompted GigaOM's Mathew Ingram to give his own social media advice for journalists, telling them to talk to people, link, retweet, reply when spoken to, admit when they're wrong and be human — but not too human. Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, defined online engagement in terms of outreach, conversation, and collaboration. — Publishers begin to jump in with Apple: A couple of big media-on-iPad developments this week: Time Inc. reached a deal with Apple to allow magazine subscribers to get iPad apps for free, and Hearst became one of the first major publishers to agree to offer subscriptions within iPad (which means Apple's getting that 30% cut), though Advertising Age's Nat Ives wondered if Condé Nast will beat Hearst to the punch. The British newspaper the Telegraph also launched an iPad edition, and the Guardian's Stuart Dredge noted that both the Telegraph and Hearst are asking customers to share their personal data with them (Apple already gets customer data), and the Telegraph is giving an incentive to them to do so. Meanwhile, the company Yudu has launched some sort of service that will somehow allow publishers to evade Apple's 30% in-app subscription cut and apparently got Apple's approval. (As you can tell, details are sketchy at this point.) Elsewhere in news on the iPad, News Corp. said it's lost million on The Daily this quarter, which has reportedly gotten 800,000 downloads. Former Marketwatch CEO Larry Kramer said The Daily is gradually getting better, though. — Pardon AOL's dust: Arianna Huffington keeps on cleaning house at AOL, with a handful of new changes each week. This week: AOL News was folded into the Huffington Post, and Patch announced they're launching Patch Latino sites in California and unveiled the hyperlocal blogging network for which it's been recruiting volunteers for the past couple of weeks. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported that AOL is continuing to pour millions of dollars into Patch and expects to lose money on the site this year. Even if Patch works journalistically, Mathew Ingram said, that doesn't mean it'll make any business sense. The Next Web's Alex Wilhelm warned of the homogenization threatened by the AOL content empire and NPR's On the Media debated whether the Huffington Post is good for journalism. Amid the hand-wringing, Lauren Rabaino of 10,000 pointed out five good things Patch sites are doing, including transparency and accountability by editors. — Reading roundup: Believe it or not, people in media circles talked about things this week that didn't have to do with Osama bin Laden or AOL. Here are a few of them: — Marco Arment's post last week about his successful experiments in charging for Instapaper turned into an interesting discussion about creating a freemium or "business class" for news. Here's Frederic Filloux, Oliver Reichenstein, and Mathew Ingram. — Another noteworthy conversation that sprung week: Scott Rosenberg, Dave Winer, and Amy Gahran on why journalists should be wary of Facebook — because eventually, as Rosenberg said, "it’s not the public sphere, not in the way the Internet itself is. It’s just a company." — The Wall Street Journal became the latest news org to launch a platform modeled after the WikiLeaks anonymous leaking concept, with SafeHouse. The Atlantic has plenty of details. — Finally, two useful sets of tips: One from Poynter's Julie Moos about news blogging from filling in for Jim Romenesko for a week, and the other from TBD's Steve Buttry on possible revenue streams for newspapers.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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

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

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/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-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/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:51:38 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=834

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This Week in Review: The Guardian goes digital first, local journalism’s future, and preserving news stories

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 3, 2011.] The Times' new top dog: There's no question what the top story is this week: For the first time in eight years, the U.S.' most prominent news organization, The New York Times, will have a new executive editor. And for the first time ever, that editor will be a woman. The Times announced yesterday that Bill Keller will be stepping down from the job to be a columnist, and managing editor Jill Abramson will move into the top spot, with former Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet taking her current position. To hear the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz tell it, the timing of the move was a surprise, but Abramson's appointment was not. So who is Jill Abramson, and what does her appointment mean for the future of digital news at the Times? This New York magazine profile from last year and Adweek backgrounder give a good basic picture — she's a longtime Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who's been at the Times for 14 years, and she's known as a blunt, critical editor. As for her webbiness, the Lab's Joshua Benton looked briefly through her history to find signs of a generally positive attitude toward digital media (she led the integration of the Times' print and web newsrooms, and spent five months immersing herself in the Times' digital side last year). Poynter found some 2010 quotes in which Abramson was pro-multiplatform news and anti-citizen journalism. Abramson also talked to Ad Age about breaking down a print-based newsroom publishing culture and about her commitment to the Times' paywall. We also learned that Abramson doesn't plan to continue Keller's feud with Arianna Huffington, and has a "fervent belief" in narrative nonfiction writing. And she got the seal of approval from former Times social media editor Jennifer Preston, who tweeted: "For all of you wondering about Jill Abramson and the Web? Jill gets it. And she's fearless. We're lucky." Then, of course, there's Keller. In various interviews, he talked about why he left now — because he wanted to hand the job off when things were going well, and he wanted to make sure the paywall was instituted and the newsroom integrated first. He also said the job switched from being mostly about journalism to being mostly about business, and talked about how brutal it was to go through the recession at the Times. The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder praised his ability to keep the Times in relatively good shapethrough such a tough stretch. As for what's next, Reuters' Felix Salmon said one of Abramson's primary tasks will be making the Times a more transparent place, and Poynter's Jill Geisler said her promotion could help push other newsrooms to move women into positions of leadership. — How necessary is the news article?: This week's most interesting discussion grew out of last week's devastating tornado in Joplin, Missouri — specifically, New York Times writer Brian Stelter's reporting of the story from Joplin on Twitter. On his blog, Stelter gave a blow-by-blow of his reporting there, concluding, "I think my best reporting was on Twitter." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram praised Stelter's work as evidence that the Times is becoming more open to the open web, and Rowan j-prof Mark Berkey-Gerard talked about why it made a great example for journalism students. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis used Stelter's Twitter reporting to argue that the article is no longer the core journalistic product, but a byproduct of the journalistic process. "When digital comes first and print last, then the article is something you need to put together to fill the paper; it’s not the goal of the entire process," he wrote. "The process is the goal of the process: keeping the public constantly informed." The Sacramento Press' Ben Ilfeld took the point further, calling the article an "antiquated by product not of good journalism, but a quickly fading era." And Jonathan Glick of Sulia said the article is being divorced into quick, mobile-friendly news nuggets and analytical, long-form journalism. Mathew Ingram tweaked Jarvis' argument, saying that while Twitter is critical in the reporting process, it hardly renders articles unnecessary. (Jarvis responded by asserting that Ingram was mischaracterizing his argument.) South Carolina j-prof Doug Fisher tried to reconcile the two positions, pointing out that what journalists call a news "story" isn't really one: Instead, it's a "factoid exposition that tries to impose structure on often unstructured events." And Jarvis looked for a different name for "long-form journalism" — something that doesn't imply that length equals intelligence. — Hackers target PBS: When various corporations and government entities tightened the screws on WikiLeaks last December, the loose online activism collective Anonymous descended on those groups' sites with a series of attacks. This week, a different online group turned their attacks toward a news organization for the first time in defense of WikiLeaks. The new group, which calls itself LulzSec, hacked the PBS website last weekend in response to a Frontline documentary on WikiLeaks, publishing thousands of passwords and posting a fake story on the PBS homepage about Tupac being found alive. Then, a couple of days later, LulzSec hacked PBS' site again. PBS NewsHour found ways to get their news out without their website, posting to Tumblr and talking to viewers on Facebook. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman used the opportunity to provide a helpful list of tips for news organizations on preparing for a potential hack. One of LulzSec's members talked to Parmy Olson of Forbes about the attack, saying that while they certainly weren't pleased by the documentary, their primary goal was entertainment. That's not how it was seen at PBS, though. The New York Times' Brian Stelter reported that the attacks were perceived at PBS as "attempts to chill independent journalism." "This is what repressive governments do," Frontline executive producer David Fanning told him. "This is what people who don’t want information out in the world do — they try to shut the presses." NewsHour reporter Judy Woodruff expressed a similar sentiment in a column on PBS' (since restored) site. — An iPad dissenter: Magazine publishers have been among the most eager media organizations to jump onto the iPad, but one publisher, Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner, pushed back against that enthusiasm this week. Wenner said tablet editions aren't particularly useful for magazine readers, and not cost-effective for publishers, either. It'll be a generation or two before the shift from to tablets is decisive, he said. Wenner advised publishers to be attuned to changes in technology, but cautioned that "to rush to throw away your magazine business and move it on the iPad is just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear." Forbes' Jeff Bercovici ridiculed Wenner's statements, recounting his history of web aversion and the way it's hurt his magazine. Advertising Age's Nat Ives, who conducted the Wenner interview, pointed out elsewhere that magazine readers' demographics aren't exactly improving. Elsewhere in the world of the iPad: Fox News and the San Francisco Chronicle launched their apps, the New York Times offered a steep iPad discount for some people already getting free web subscriptions, and Nomad Editions is working on at least seven more new iPad-based magazines. But a Nielsen Norman Group study found that many iPad app designers are confusing users by requiring gestures that are too subtle, resulting in apps that can be tougher to use than the organization's own website. — Web filters and broadening our horizons: One other thought-provoking conversation worth noting: It started last week with a New York Times column by MoveOn.org's Eli Pariser, who argued that while the modern digital media environment has broken down the old system of traditional-media gatekeepers, it's set up a new set of gatekeepers in its place — not people this time, but code. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing reviewed the book on which Pariser's column was based, and while he agreed with some of Pariser's premises, he countered that Pariser underestimates the power of our personally controlled filtering devices to put a check on some of the online manipulation he describes. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, on the other hand, argued that our problem is not having too many filters, but not having enough. Information overload, he said, is a greater danger right now than hyper-personalization. At Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody said that what Pariser's concerned about is not so much narrowing of opinions as narrowing of interests. That's a new-media incarnation of an old problem, he said, and the web has the ability to help solve it too: "we’re often unaware of what’s happening in the next room, where there is frequently plenty of useful stuff that we could port into our own special areas of interest. We need to make sure we’re taking advantage of the web’s built-in ability to move laterally." — Reading roundup: A few smaller items to keep an eye on this week: — A couple of leftovers from the discussion on Twitter over the past few weeks: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal on Twitter's oral culture, media consultant Frederic Filloux on why Bill Keller's criticism of Twitter (and Twitter for itself, for that matter) doesn't carry much weight, and the Lab's Megan Garber with a fantastic post on why discourse on Twitter is so difficult to classify. — Two pieces with some great tips on engagement: Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter with some doable steps for journalists, and the Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry with advice on local engagement on Twitter. — Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt always makes headlines when he gives public interviews like he did at the All Things Digital conference this week, and the Lab's Joshua Benton focused on one aspect that could be of particular for news organizations: Google's efforts to answer your questions before you even get to the search stage. — Two great pieces to leave you with: The always-thoughtful Jonathan Stray threw out a few ideas on developing collaborative systems for investigative journalism, and Toronto Star vet Judy Sims shared a speech she gave with nine principles for newspapers to follow to adapt to the abundant-media era.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-the-times%e2%80%99-changing-of-the-guard-the-news-article%e2%80%99s-future-and-pbs-is-attacked/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:51:39 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=806

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

This Week in Review: New business models and traffic drivers in online news, and wrangling over app ads

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 6, 2011.] Twitter as breaking-news system: This week's big news is obvious: American forces killed Osama bin Laden on Monday (Sunday for most Westerners) in a raid of his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But you already knew that, and how exactly you found out is the first angle I want to look at. The news blew up on Twitter and Facebook late Sunday night after the White House announced President Obama would be addressing the nation. The ensuing frenzy set a record for the highest volume of sustained activity on Twitter, with an average of 3,000 tweets per second for about three hours. While most Americans first got the news from TV, about a fifth of young people found out online. That led to another round of celebration of Twitter as the emerging source for big breaking news — Business Insider's Matt Rosoff called the story Twitter's CNN moment and said Twitter was "faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there." PR guru Brian Solis described Twitter as "a perfect beast for committing acts of journalism," and University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida said it's becoming routine to see Twitter as the first option for breaking news coverage. Others pushed back against that praise: Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco argued that everyone on Twitter was still waiting for confirmation from government officials and the mainstream media, and Dan Mitchell of SF Weekly said that most of the people tweeting the news were from traditional media anyway. The American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder said the aide who broke the story on Twitter wasn't doing journalism, but just passing on a rumor. And Engadget vet Joshua Topolsky said the Twitter buzz probably says more about our need to tell others we got to the news first than it does about Twitter. Several folks staked out a spot between the two positions. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld said Twitter doesn't supplant traditional media, but it does amplify it and drive people to it. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram advised us to think about it not in terms of competition between old and new media, but as part of a news ecosystem: "it’s not really about Twitter or Facebook; it’s about the power of the network." Elsewhere, media analyst Dan Gillmor compared this story to how the 9/11 news broke, GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham classified the seven stages of breaking news on Twitter, and Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan looked at the way Google responded to the story. Three other mini-stories within the digital aspect of the Bin Laden story: First, regarding traditional media outlets' online efforts, former Guardian digital chief Emily Bell wrote a fantastic piece about how live news coverage is the great challenge of our time for news orgs, the Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles critiqued the performance of mobile news sites, and the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones ripped some news iPad apps for being slow with the story. Second, there was plenty of discussion about the remarkable story of Pakistani programmer Sohaib Athar, who live-tweeted the raid without knowing it. Poynter's Steve Myers went meta with the account of how we found out about him, revealing some interesting examples of how information travels through a network like Twitter. He then defended Athar as a citizen journalist. And third, the Atlantic's Megan McArdle explained how a quotation got misattributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and then went viral, and Frederic Lardinois of NewsGrange mused about the difficulty of social media corrections. — Osama and the Times' pay wall: While we've been focusing on the digital media side of things so far, Bin Laden's death was the type of massive story that traditional news organizations go into overdrive on, too. Poynter and the Columbia Journalism Review have great looks at how news orgs played the story in print and online, and we got some behind-the-scenes glimpses at how the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, CNN, and other mainstream journalists put together reports on such quick deadlines. The Times made an interesting decision in the wake of the story not to lift its pay wall/gate/fence for news on Bin Laden's death, even though it had previously expressed a willingness to allow free access for big stories. The Lab's Megan Garber asked a number of questions about that issue — who makes that decision? And if this isn't a huge story, what is? — and noted that the fact that it was the beginning of the month and many users' meters had just been reset played into the decision. Meanwhile, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times criticized the cheerleading tone of TV news' coverage, and Slate's Jack Shafer called out some of the inaccuracies in news stories on Bin Laden's death. — Giving reporters social-media leeway: We saw a case study in contrasting newsroom social media policies, starting when Bloomberg' guidelines were leaked to eMedia Vitals last week. It encouraged reporters to use Twitter, with several restrictions listed under one strong caveat: "Ask questions first. Tweet later." A couple of days later, John Paton of the Journal Register Co. posted his own company's social media policy. It was blank — implying that the company doesn't put any explicit restrictions on what or how employees can post. Techdirt's Mike Masnick praised Paton's philosophy: "These things are developing quickly, and for people to find out how to use these tools most efficiently and effectively, they need to feel free to experiment and do whatever needs to be done." That prompted GigaOM's Mathew Ingram to give his own social media advice for journalists, telling them to talk to people, link, retweet, reply when spoken to, admit when they're wrong and be human — but not too human. Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, defined online engagement in terms of outreach, conversation, and collaboration. — Publishers begin to jump in with Apple: A couple of big media-on-iPad developments this week: Time Inc. reached a deal with Apple to allow magazine subscribers to get iPad apps for free, and Hearst became one of the first major publishers to agree to offer subscriptions within iPad (which means Apple's getting that 30% cut), though Advertising Age's Nat Ives wondered if Condé Nast will beat Hearst to the punch. The British newspaper the Telegraph also launched an iPad edition, and the Guardian's Stuart Dredge noted that both the Telegraph and Hearst are asking customers to share their personal data with them (Apple already gets customer data), and the Telegraph is giving an incentive to them to do so. Meanwhile, the company Yudu has launched some sort of service that will somehow allow publishers to evade Apple's 30% in-app subscription cut and apparently got Apple's approval. (As you can tell, details are sketchy at this point.) Elsewhere in news on the iPad, News Corp. said it's lost million on The Daily this quarter, which has reportedly gotten 800,000 downloads. Former Marketwatch CEO Larry Kramer said The Daily is gradually getting better, though. — Pardon AOL's dust: Arianna Huffington keeps on cleaning house at AOL, with a handful of new changes each week. This week: AOL News was folded into the Huffington Post, and Patch announced they're launching Patch Latino sites in California and unveiled the hyperlocal blogging network for which it's been recruiting volunteers for the past couple of weeks. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported that AOL is continuing to pour millions of dollars into Patch and expects to lose money on the site this year. Even if Patch works journalistically, Mathew Ingram said, that doesn't mean it'll make any business sense. The Next Web's Alex Wilhelm warned of the homogenization threatened by the AOL content empire and NPR's On the Media debated whether the Huffington Post is good for journalism. Amid the hand-wringing, Lauren Rabaino of 10,000 pointed out five good things Patch sites are doing, including transparency and accountability by editors. — Reading roundup: Believe it or not, people in media circles talked about things this week that didn't have to do with Osama bin Laden or AOL. Here are a few of them: — Marco Arment's post last week about his successful experiments in charging for Instapaper turned into an interesting discussion about creating a freemium or "business class" for news. Here's Frederic Filloux, Oliver Reichenstein, and Mathew Ingram. — Another noteworthy conversation that sprung week: Scott Rosenberg, Dave Winer, and Amy Gahran on why journalists should be wary of Facebook — because eventually, as Rosenberg said, "it’s not the public sphere, not in the way the Internet itself is. It’s just a company." — The Wall Street Journal became the latest news org to launch a platform modeled after the WikiLeaks anonymous leaking concept, with SafeHouse. The Atlantic has plenty of details. — Finally, two useful sets of tips: One from Poynter's Julie Moos about news blogging from filling in for Jim Romenesko for a week, and the other from TBD's Steve Buttry on possible revenue streams for newspapers.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-talking-bin-laden-on-twitter-journos%e2%80%99-online-freedom-and-apple-gets-a-taker/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 11, 2011.] Google+ courts businesses: After banning businesses for its first four months, Google+ finally let them in this week, launching Google+ Pages, which gives accounts to business and groups. (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land put together the best walkthrough of what Pages are and how they work.) Businesses jumped right in, including, of course, news orgs: Breaking News put together a running list of news Pages, and one Fox News show announced it would do Hangouts with presidential candidates, starting with Mitt Romney next week. As Business Insider explained, Google has a big carrot to draw businesses in: Direct Connect, which allows users to go directly to a business's Google+ Page if they the business's name preceded by a "+". Lost Remote's Cory Bergman (who also runs the Breaking News Google+ account) said businesses should also get some SEO mojo from users clicking +1 on their Google+ account, which he argued was enough of a payoff to justify maintaining a Google+ account — at least for now, anyway. Social media guru Robert Scoble, on the other hand, was disappointed in Pages, calling them clumsy and difficult to manage. Fast Company's Mark Wilson brought up the same point and added that since Google gives individuals two options of how to engage with businesses instead of Facebook's single "Like," most people will choose the weaker option. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid wondered what exactly that weaker option, giving the business a +1, will do. For Slate's Farhad Manjoo, the addition of Pages was too little, too late for Google+. He declared the social network dead, a victim of Google's launch-then-fix-it model that has worked so well for most of its products. "But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place," Manjoo wrote, arguing that Google should have let its users be more free to experiment to make up for its initial deficits. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and the New York Times' Nick Bilton countered that it's too soon to give up on the network, because Google+ is designed to be not just another social network, but instead the connective tissue integrating an entire way to experience the web. Google has some pretty good cards still its hand that can help it reach that goal, too, he said. — Romenesko, attribution, and hair-splitting: Jim Romenesko, the dean of media bloggers soon to semi-retire from the Poynter Institute, was pushed into a bizarre little controversy yesterday when his editor, Julie Moos, wrote a post taking him to task for "incomplete attribution" in his posts — essentially, using language from the posts he's summarizing (and linking to) without putting it in quote marks. Moos wrote the post in response to questions from the Columbia Journalism Review as it develops an article on the subject. Romenesko wasn't asked to resign (he offered his resignation twice but Moos rejected it), but he will have to follow stricter attribution guidelines and have his posts edited before they go up. 10,000 Words' Elena Zak praised Poynter's transparency, but to most observers, this was ethical hairsplitting run amok. Media consultant Mark Potts hit many of the main points in his defense of Romenesko, noting that no one has complained to Poynter about this in the decade he's been blogging for them. Reuters' Felix Salmon pointed to Romenesko's stature in the blogosphere and his role in establishing the field's norms: "If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines." The Awl's Choire Sicha took the opportunity to level a more serious charge at Poynter's handling of Romenesko's blog, saying that "Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost 'engagement'" and other online-media buzzwords. For his part, Romenesko himself expressed his frustration in typically understated fashion in an email to the New York Times, then tweeted that "I feel it's time to go." — Is future-of-news talk hurting journalism?: This week, we got the rare opportunity to have a substantive, big-picture (meta)discussion about the way we think about the future of news when the Columbia Journalism Review published a thorough critique by Dean Starkman of 'future of news' thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen. The piece is quite long, but worth a close read: In short, Starkman argued that these thinkers are undermining the most valuable form of journalism — public-service journalism — by disempowering journalists and their institutions and by wasting their limited time (and the public's) with endless, mostly useless experimentation and busywork. Instead, Starkman proposed a model built around maintaining journalism's most valued institutions, arguing that "journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself." Several people objected to Starkman's argument, starting with media strategist Terry Heaton, who countered that it's not institutions the future-of-news people have a problem with, but hierarchical institutions, and former Wall Street Journal writer Jason Fry, who said that some forms of news are indeed a commodity. A few others, like Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and Steve Buttry of the Journal Register Co. argued that deep reporting vs. new media mastery isn't an either/or proposition, pointing to examples of news organizations like the Guardian who do both well. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell also wrote about her old paper's efforts in making a similar point, arguing that the spirit of muckraking is being carried on in these digital, networked initiatives. "The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting. It should be at the heart of it. And if it is not, then the institutions that Starkman laments might be to blame," she wrote. Starkman responded by arguing that it all boils down to stories, but the future-of-news folks want to talk about something else, and here at the Lab, C.W. Anderson weighed in on with a smart post on the ways in which institutions can be forces for both good and ill. — A force for digital change in the newsroom: The New York Times announced this week the retirement (effective the end of the year) of one of the pioneers of news on the web — Martin Nisenholtz, a senior vice president at the paper. As the Times noted, Nisenholtz has been intimately involved in just about every major technological initiative the Times has undertaken since he came on board in 1995: Launching the website, moving it into mobile media and tablets, and instituting its paywall earlier this year. Poynter's Julie Moos put together a greatest-hits of commentary by and about Nisenholtz over the years, including his prediction in early 2004 that smart phones would be a particularly influential force in changing news delivery. PaidContent's Staci Kramer talked about his lasting impact: No matter how slow (or fast) the transition seemed, "the NYT has an integrated newsroom with an understanding that digital, while it may not always be first, is equal." Dave Winer, who helped create RSS, pointed out that Nisenholtz made the Times the first major publisher to license its stories for RSS, making a significant contribution to the growth of the open web in the process. The Lab's Joshua Benton used that story to illustrate thateven if news orgs can't invent these transformative web tools, they can still play a big role in their evolution and adoption. Media prof C.W. Anderson also noted another contribution Nisenholtz made — by allowing a scholar access to study his paper's digital efforts, he helped revitalize the field of digital media sociology. — A neutral way to tweet: If a few of the most recent sets of social media guidelines are any indication, news organizations are really struggling with the concept of their journalists' retweets on Twitter. Several of those organizations have asked journalists not to retweet opinionated content without comment, lest they be thought of as biased themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman tried to resolve that problem with an idea for an NT, or neutral tweet, which people could use to retweet something while declaring their neutrality about it. Most journalism folks on Twitter didn't like the idea, as Sonderman himself showed in his fine roundup of reaction. Many of them saw it as a way to avoid interacting naturally on Twitter, a "pacifier" or "high tech milquetoast," in the words of j-profs Jay Rosen and Matt Waite. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram expanded on the idea, calling it a solution to the wrong problem. "By pretending that their journalists don’t have opinions, when everyone knows that they do, mainstream media outlets are suggesting their viewers or readers are too stupid to figure out where the truth lies," he wrote. — Reading roundup: Lots of smaller stories and discussions popping in and out of the future-of-news world this week. Here's a few of them: — This week in News Corp. scandal: Rupert Murdoch's son, James, told British Parliament he didn't mislead them last time he talked to them. Or, as Gawker put it, he asserted that everyone's a liar except him. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade doesn't believe him. Murdoch also said the company might still close its British newspaper, the Sun. And we also found out News of the World hired people to spy on their hacking victims' lawyers. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger put the scandal in perspective in a lecture. — New York Times media critic David Carr mused on the decline of WikiLeaks as an organization and its implications for radical transparency as a movement. Dave Winer and Mathew Ingram responded by questioning why the Times hasn't supported WikiLeaks more itself. — Andy Rooney of CBS' 60 Minutes, one of the icons of American broadcast television, died late last week at age 92. You can check out the obituaries from CBS and the New York Times, a set of his classic essays at Gawker, and a thoughtful remembrance by tech entrepreneur Anil Dash. — Finally, two great pieces of advice for two groups of people: Longtime News & Record editor John Robinson for newspaper editors, and MIT's Ethan Zuckerman for media consumers (read: all of us).]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the