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-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:20:17 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=920

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 18, 2011.] A fight for online freedom: A U.S. House committee hearing brought an important three-week old bill on Internet censorship to the spotlight this week. The Stop Online Piracy Act (a companion of the Senate's Protect IP Act), would allow content creators to shut down websites on which people hosted unauthorized copyrighted content, or linked to sites that did. The Atlantic has a good, quick explainer, and the advocacy group Fight for the Future has a sharp video illustrating its implications. If you want to go in-depth, Techdirt has the most thorough continuing coverage of the bill. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that it seems as though pretty much everyone on the Internet hates this bill. Bunches of Internet giants oppose it — Google was a major testifier at this week's hearing (though its rep referenced the WikiLeaks payment blocks favorably, which concerned some) — Tumblr ran an online campaign against the bill by mock-censoring its users' dashboard screens, and loads of online commentators howled against it. Here's why they're so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow for free speech on the web. The New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: "The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can't control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken." As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, you can't have the explosion of creative production, individual empowerment, and democratic potential of the Internet without the downsides of rampant copyright infringement. If you take away the latter, he argued, you take away the former, too. And venture capitalist Brad Burnham made the interesting point that the architecture of the web is based on the assumption that there are more good actors out there than bad, an idea that this bill runs squarely against. This bill poses some potential problems for journalism, too. Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words outlined some of those issues, pointing out that articles could be censored for linking to sites with piracy information, and that citizen journalism and innovation could be stifled. — Twitter as one-way street: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report this week on the way news organizations use Twitter, and the results weren't pretty: News orgs, they found, were using Twitter predominantly as a way to simply broadcast their stories online, not taking much advantage of Twitter's interactive capabilities or its ability to link readers to a wide variety of sources. PEJ said the behavior was reminiscent of the link-phobic early days of the web, and the Lab's Megan Garber called it a "glorified RSS feed." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was particularly troubled by how little news orgs and their journalists asked readers for news tips and feedback, and media consultant Terry Heaton said this Twitter-as-headline-feed pattern among news orgs is evidence that it really is all about the money. "If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web," he wrote. "When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else." Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, tied the study to another Pew study that reinforced the value of personal recommendations over impersonal ones. There was also quite a bit of talk on Twitter about the study's weaknesses, led largely by media scholars like USC's Robert Hernandez. Still, one j-prof, Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, pointed out that this report's findings do echo those of several previous studies, both academic and professional. — Occupy Wall Street and scooping the wire: New York police swooped in earlier this week to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which in itself wasn't surprising: Similar sweeps have been done in numerous American cities. What drew particular attention among future-of-news folks was the way they did it — by blocking journalists from viewing the action and even arresting 26 of them across the country, of whom seven worked full-time for traditional news orgs and seven had NYPD press credentials. The New York Times and the Atlantic have the most thorough accounts of what went on, and you can check out video of one of the reporter arrests at the Times' The Local. One interesting side story to emerge from those arrests began when AP staff members tweeted that their AP colleagues had been arrested before the news hit the wire. The AP sent out a stern memo admonishing its journalists to beat their own wire reports on Twitter, prompting the New York Times' Brian Stelter to ask, "Shouldn't the wire speed up?!" GigaOM's Mathew said news orgs should consider Twitter the newswire now, and Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that policies like the AP's (and Reuters') are the products of head-in-the-sand thinking. (The AP sent out another memo the next day explaining that its initial memo was more about the safety of its arrested reporters than anything.) Elsewhere in Occupy-related media and tech ideas: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal kicked off a series of posts on technology's role in the Occupy protests with a creative description of Occupy as a type of API, ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell praised Storify for its role in Occupy coverage, and New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard explained why she's ditching the objectivity-based paradigm of the mainstream media to get involved with Occupy. — Romenesko and online attribution: A few of the loose ends from Jim Romenesko's unceremonious departure from the Poynter Institute were tied up since last week's review: Poynter renamed Romenesko's blog MediaWire, and in an interview, Romenesko shed some light on his insistence on resigning: "I worked there for 12 years, and I'm supposed to spend my final days being supervised, having a babysitter, whatever? It just seemed a little bit humiliating." Most notably, the Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry published the article resulting from the reporting that started this bizarre episode. In it, she argued that the attribution problems aren't limited to Romenesko, but are in part of a function of Poynter's move to longer — and, as she put it — "over-aggregated" posts. Several Poynter faculty members also weighed in, with Roy Peter Clark providing the sharpest take: "The standards of attribution we still apply in print may in fact be outdated in the age of sampling, file sharing, and mash-ups." Other media critics continued to defend Romenesko (Reuters' Jack Shafer) and rip Poynter (Terry Heaton, Felix Salmon). The Gender Report's Jasmine Linabary, meanwhile, wondered why we weren't seeing much attention paid to women commenting on the Romenesko story. — Amazon releases the Kindle Fire: Amazon released its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week, and the reviews were mixed. (PaidContent has a quick roundup of some of the big reviewers.) It got panned by a few places (most notably Wired), but the general sentiment was that while the Fire can't match up the iPad and some of the other top-end tablets, it's still a decent deal at 0. As the New York Times' David Pogue put it: "The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish." A few other notes regarding the Fire: Time Inc. had five of its magazines on the Fire at its launch after some protracted negotiating, and Amazon has made the Fire's source code available to developers to encourage software experimentation. Wired's Steven Levy, meanwhile, had an in-depth discussion with Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the state of the company. — Reading roundup: Bunches and bunches of interesting little stories this week. Here are a few we haven't hit yet: — A federal judge ruled late last week that Twitter has to hand over information about possible WikiLeaks supporters, one of whom, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, expressed her outrage in the Guardian over the decision's threat to civil rights. ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram were also among those concerned about the future of privacy online. — A few advertising-related tidbits: Reuters' Felix Salmon summarized a fascinating talk he gave on the woeful state of online advertising and what to do about it, Wired looked at Twitter's efforts to make serendipity pay as an advertising model, and the Lab examined newspapers' advertising efforts on Twitter. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an innovative cross-platform interactive ad that also mimicked its news content, which led ACES' Charles Apple and the Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler to question its ethics. The Times told Hendler the ad couldn't realistically be confused with actual Times content. — The Columbia Journalism Review explored a crucial issue in the changing news ecosystem — what happens to all the communities that aren't hubs for innovation? — with a series of pieces on Modesto, California. — Also in CJR, Megan Garber wrote a fascinating article looking back at how journalism has viewed its future over the years. The University of Colorado's Steve Outing decided to add to that tradition of journalistic fortune-telling with his set of predictions about what online news will look like 20 years from now.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:40 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=905

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

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

Buy Adipex Without Prescription

]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] A heavyweight enters the tablet ring: Amazon became the latest company to jump into the tablet market this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a 9 tablet that will run on Google's Android system. It's a 7" touch-screen tablet that's essentially a knockoff of the BlackBerry Playbook — much smaller and cheaper than Apple's iPad. Amazon also revealed three new Kindle models ranging from to 9, two of them touch-screen, as well as a new Kindle Fire-only web browser, Silk (more on that at the LA Times). The two most comprehensive early looks at the Fire came from Wired's Steven Levy and Bloomberg's Brad Stone. Levy looked more at the device itself, describing it as a way for Amazon to spotlight its non-book media library and saying its biggest challenge is to Netflix. Stone looked more at the corporate strategy behind the Fire, noting that it "funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing." (Sounds like a certain other tablet we know.) By the end of launch day, several tech sites like TechCrunch and ZDNet had already declared the Fire the winner of the hypercompetitive Android tablet market, and Ad Age said it would soon have tablet consumption taking off. The bigger question, then, was whether the Fire would present the first real threat to Apple's iPad. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal summed up the Fire's challenge to the iPad — smaller, cheaper, and the first media experience as thoroughly integrated as Apple's App Store. As the Atlantic's Alesh Houdek put it, the Fire may do most everything tablet owners really want, only for a lot less than the iPad. But ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow said the Fire can't match up to the iPad, and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and paidContent's Tom Krazit both said it's not even directly competing with the iPad — it's in a more utilitarian market, where the iPad is more about luxury. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that to content producers, Amazon and Apple are going to look very similar: They both see their devices as ways to sell their own content, which puts them in competition with the content providers themselves. The Fire also launched with a newsstand, with big magazine publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith among the first to sign deals with Amazon, under similar terms to Apple's 30% cut of revenue. (News Corp. also signed a deal to put Fox TV shows on the Fire.) The New York Observer's Emily Witt noted that the Fire could be the mobile-content Apple competitor publishers have been looking for, and the Lab's Martin Langeveld said the Fire will present a fresh disruption for content providers, furthering the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing and eliminating the need for third-party advertising. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman posed several questions journalists should be asking about the Fire, looking at things like paid content, customer data, and app development. — Objections to 'frictionless sharing': Reactions continued to pour in about Facebook's latest overhaul, announced late last week. Many of those concerns centered around the same theme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's brave new world of ubiquitous, "frictionless" sharing. The New York Times' Somini Sengupta and the LA Times' Jessica Guynn gave us a picture of what this world might look like, and Slate's Farhad Manjoo explained why sharing should still be a choice. Needless to say, this brought up another round of complaints about privacy on Facebook: Tech pioneer Dave Winer said Facebook has crossed the privacy Rubicon by seeking out information about you to post to others, rather than just using information you've chosen to share. Entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook can track every page you visit even when you're logged out. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter argued that this type of involuntary sharing should be a concern for every news organization that works with Facebook, and former New York Times developer Michael Donohoe said the Times refused to implement that kind of sharing via Facebook. There was one (non-Facebook) voice countering that the passive sharing isn't that big of a deal: Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. A couple of deeper thoughts on the issue: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote on Facebook as "the Meaning Machine," and media prof Mark Deuze argued that living our lives inside of a mediated environment (like Facebook encourages to) can actually help us to see ourselves as deeply connected to others, if we're willing to let go of our self-absorption. As I touched on a bit earlier, there's also the question of what news organizations should do with Facebook: Gawker's Ryan Tate explained why many media companies are so eager to be part of Facebook's plans (huge audiences, huge amounts of data), and Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik explained at the Lab and at the Online News Association conference how journalists can take advantage of these changes. But Jeff Sonderman was a bit more skeptical, urging news organizations to weigh the costs as well as the benefits. Finally, these changes probably aren't good news for Google and its own network Google+, as Facebook begins collecting loads of valuable personal data that Google can't touch, Mathew Ingram explained. Twitter does its own thing (real-time news) too well to be too worried, Ingram said, but the New York Times' Nick Bilton wrote that Twitter isn't user-friendly enough to be for everyone, as Facebook is. — Media trust and the new local news: The Pew Research Center released two surveys over the past week or so: The first was the latest in a regular series of looks at the American public's views of the press, and results weren't pretty. The press hit record lows in the public's mind in terms of fairness, accuracy, bias, morality, professionalism, and impact on democracy. (Poynter has a good, quick summary.) Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that many of the poll respondents get most of their news from TV, which he said isn't a particularly substantive media diet. "The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs," he wrote. One other nugget: j-prof Alfred Hermida pointed outthat many social media say they get the same news there as on traditional news. The second study examined the platforms on which people get their local news. There were a few different takeaways from this one: The New York Times focused on the fact that a broad range of platforms have joined TV as predominant local news sources, while the LA Times and Poynter's Rick Edmonds centered on the paradox that many people were very dependent on their local newspaper but still wouldn't care much if it were gone. O'Reilly Radar's Alex Howard had a fine analysis of the study, using it as a jumping-off point for a piece on the Internet as the future of local news. Other notes from the data: Broadcasting & Cable looked at the areas where local TV did well, Poynter's Julie Moos noticed that many people follow local news even when nothing big is going on, and paidContent focused on the role of mobile media in local news consumption. — More over-aggregation accusations: The business news site Business Insider announced some happy news late last week — it had recently raised  million in funding. But that announcement prompted a wave of criticism about the ethics of their aggregation efforts. Reuters' Ryan McCarthy laid out the basic accusation: Business Insider, he said, routinely lifts large chunks of stories from other outlets while only providing scant attribution or links. Others, like former Business Insider employee Ben Popper of BetaBeat, echoed the complaint. So did Instapaper founder Marco Arment, who noted how little traffic he gets from Business Insider republishing his stories. Business Insider's Henry Blodget responded twice to Arment, the second time in a massively long, detailed post essentially blaming the aggregation problems on some weird content management system glitches. Based on that post, Reuters' Felix Salmon said Business Insider still falls on the wrong side of "over-aggregation," drawing a distinction between human-edited and automatically driven aggregation pages. There was some praise for Business Insider in light of their funding, though — CNBC.com and the Guardian both looked at what makes the site work so well. — Reading roundup: Other stuff to keep an eye on this week: — The Wall Street Journal changed its website's privacy policy to connect personally identifiable data with browsing history without user permission. Yeah, people weren't crazy about that, especially since the Journal has been one of the big crusaders in reporting on corporate violations of privacy online. Here's New York magazine's and Dan Gillmor's takes. — Google launched Google News Standout, which allows news organizations to flag their top work. The Lab's Megan Garber examined the way it rewards generosity, and Wired's Tim Carmody looked at the increasing integration between Google News and Google+. — This Week in Patch: Patch's local site editors are reportedly being asked to drum up sales leads, and the Batavian's Howard Owens said if you're going to work that hard on local news, you might as well start your own site. Patch President Warren Webster pushed backagainst the criticism. — The Financial Times said its web-based app has been a higher seller than the Apple App Store version, and ReadWriteWeb called it abig early victory for HTML5-based app developers in their battle against Apple. — An update on News Corp.'s daily tablet publication, The Daily: It has about 120,000 weekly readers, well below Rupert Murdoch's targets for it. — Finally, a trio of super helpful/valuable posts for journalists: J-prof Paul Bradshaw wrote on what should make up journalists' network infrastructure online, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia's Jon Whiten gave a guide to making longform writing work online, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman urged news organizations to start building apps that solve problems.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-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-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:43:08 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=860

Buy Casodex Without Prescription

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 5, 2011.] How right do we need to be on Twitter?: It's not particularly uncommon for false information to spread on Twitter under the guise of breaking news, and that's what happened late last week, when several journalists spread the rumor that CNN's Piers Morgan had been suspended from his show as part of the fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal, which turned out to be untrue. This misinformation, however, led to the most interesting discussion on Twitter and accuracy we've seen in a while. It started with Reuters' Felix Salmon, one of those who tweeted the Morgan rumor, defending the practice of quickly tweeting breaking news (false, in some cases) and then quickly correcting it. "Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false," he wrote. While news organizations' official accounts should stick to confirmed reports, individual reporters should be able to tweet unconfirmed information, Salmon said, as long as they attribute it properly and correct it quickly. Several writers objected to this line of reasoning: Fishbowl NY's Chris O'Shea said Salmon should be committed to tweeting true information because the fact that he's seen as a credible news source is the reason people follow him on Twitter in the first place. The Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman countered that Twitter is much closer to publishing than a newsroom meeting: "The reason people feel a bit of embarrassment after making a mistake on Twitter is precisely because it’s so public." And Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review said Salmon's strategy constitutes a reckless disregard for reporters' individual brand and reputation. Others were more sympathetic to Salmon's point. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pushed back against Rieder, arguing that news is a process, not just the publication of a finished product, and Twitter is part of that process. Salmon's editor at Reuters, Anthony DeRosa, who also tweeted the Morgan rumor, agreed with Salmon that Twitter is a newsroom, but vowed to be more careful to tweet verified information. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry, meanwhile, said that the dichotomy between being first and being right is a false one for journalists — and that journalists should strive for both. — A new tool for the new newsroom: Chartbeat, which does real-time analytics for websites, launched a news-oriented version of its tool last week called Newsbeat. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together a good overview of the service, which includes more detail about traffic trends and sources than Chartbeat. In an interview with GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, Chartbeat's Tony Haile answered the objection that this type of data will just lead to a "tyranny of the popular," arguing instead that the service may instead show journalists how they're underestimating their audiences, or how they can repackage news stories to make them more understandable to readers. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal provided an example from his own experience, noting that Chartbeat has shown that a surprising number of offbeat longform stories there generate big traffic. Newsbeat, he said, could help the mass of news sources fighting for attention online each find their sweet spot. "I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet," he said. At Wired, Tim Carmody emphasized the real-time nature of the information, noting that the need for that kind of information is growing as news organizations are increasingly editing and publishing in real time, too. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber was intrigued by the fact that Newsbeat offers individualized dashboards for each writer and editor's content. The feature, she reasoned, demonstrates the increased encouragement of entrepreneurialism within the modern newsroom: "Increasingly, the gates of production are swinging open to journalists throughout, if not fully across, the newsroom. That’s a good thing. It’s also a big thing. And Newsbeat is reflecting it." — A truly daily tablet publication: Seems almost every other week we have a new entry into the tablet news market; this week it's AOL, which launched its daily tablet magazine Editions this week. All Things Digital and Poynter have good overviews of what the new publication is: Notably, it's delivered to your tablet just once a day (at the time of your choosing), with a set ending page, and without any updates. It's big on personalization, tailoring news to each user a bit like Pandora, and it also includes some local news and, as Poynter noted, primarily aims to recreate the print experience (a fake mailing label, even!). To the people behind Editions, its lack of updates and finite, print-like interface are assets: As one of them told the New York Times, "For a lot of people, [continual updating] becomes oppressive. This is not tapping you on the shoulder all the time." But at TechCrunch (which is also owned by AOL), Erick Schonfeld was skeptical, asserting that if he feels like he's getting day-old news on Editions, he'll just stick to the web. "News apps need to be as current as the Web. Those are just table stakes," he wrote. Mashable's Lauren Indvik, on the other hand, was rather impressed, saying the finiteness of the magazine provides a nice contrast to the unruliness of the web. — The scandal goes stateside: A couple of updates on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal: The story is beginning to migrate across the Atlantic, as attention begins to shift toward several accusations of spying made years ago against News Corp. holdings in the United States. Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke this story open earlier this summer, was reportedly in the States this week investigating News Corp. At New York magazine, Frank Rich urged Americans to look more closely into Murdoch's behavior here: "We’ve become so inured to Murdoch tactics over the years—and so many people in public life have been frightened, silenced, co-opted, or even seduced by them—that we have minimized his impact exactly the way his publicists hoped we would, downgrading News Corp. misbehavior merely to tabloid vulgarity and right-wing attack-dog politics." Two other notes: The News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is surveying subscribers about its image in light of the phone hacking scandal, and the American Journalism Review's John Morton said that for all his faults, Rupert Murdoch's heart is in newspapers, something he appreciates. — Reading roundup: Several things journalists and educators might find useful this week: — Some smaller papers in the Lee Enterprises chain are going to be trying out metered-model online pay plans, which include a small charge for the website even for print subscribers. Poynter's Rick Edmonds explained why. And at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at how the economics of circulation and advertising are moving online. — There are still a few places where print is still king — among the wealthy, for instance, as data from this Ad Age survey show. — A few great how-to's and suggestions: Journalism.co.uk's SEO primer for journalists; Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams' six proposals for journalism education; and a quick guide to data journalism from the Guardian. — Finally, media analyst Alan Mutter made a strong case for why newspapers' business model will never stabilize and urged them to begin "intelligently, and speedily, de-stabilizing their enterprises." It's a case that's been made many times before, but one that probably needs to be heard again.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:07:14 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=854

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 18, 2011.] News Corp.'s scandal keeps growing: Rupert Murdoch might have hoped News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal would die down when he closed the British tabloid News of the World last week, but it only served to fuel the issue's explosion. This past week, the scandal's collateral damage spread to News Corp.'s proposed takeover of the British broadcaster BSkyB: Faced with increasing pressure from the British government and the revelation that News Corp. journalists tried to get private records of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, News Corp. dropped the BSkyB bid, which had been a huge part of the company's U.K. strategy. Plenty of other problems are cropping up for News Corp., too. The top lawyer for its U.K. newspaper branch, News International, quit. The company's stock lost billion in four business days at one point. A pre-existing U.S. shareholders' suit expanded to cover the hacking scandal. The Murdochs have to testify before British Parliament this week about the scandal, and the FBI started investigating U.S.-related aspects of the issue. That's all in addition to the ongoing problems News Corp. faces, as detailed by Poynter's Rick Edmonds. The scandal has led quite a few writers to criticize the culture that Murdoch has created at News Corp. Capital New York's Tom McGeveran and Reuters' John Lloyd railed on Murdoch and News Corp.'s character, Carl Bernstein called this Murdoch's Watergate, and the Observer's editorial board called for systemic reforms in Britain so Murdoch's influence can never be so strong. Members of the Bancroft family said they wouldn't have sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch in 2007 if they'd have known the hacking was going on. On the other hand, the New York Times pointed out that sleazy British tabloid tactics are hardly limited to Murdoch, and media critic Howard Kurtz noted that they're very much alive in the U.S. mainstream press, too. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen defended Murdoch, saying he's been good for journalism on the whole, and Gawker's John Cook defended those tabloid reporting tactics. Meanwhile, j-prof Jeff Jarvis and the Telegraph's Toby Harnden urged the British government not to respond by enacting more regulation. News Corp.'s retreat might not stop with News of the World and BSkyB. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff and others have reported that the company's execs are debating whether to get out of Britain's newspaper business entirely, and several observers chimed in to say that might actually make a good deal of business sense. Media analyst Ken Doctor said News International is losing steam, and the Financial Times' John Gapper said newspapers are becoming far more trouble than they're worth to Murdoch. Not only that, but the New Yorker's John Cassidy said dropping his U.K. newspapers could let Murdoch revive his BSkyB bid, and Jeff Jarvis speculated that when Murdoch chooses between the power that the papers give him and the money saved by getting rid of them, he'll choose the money. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch called the rumors of a newspaper sell-off "rubbish." But just because News of the World and News International may be dead and dying, that doesn't mean newspapers as a whole are, argued David Carr of the New York Times. As he noted, it was the Guardian's dogged reporting that finally broke this story open. Murdoch "prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect," Carr wrote. The Atlantic also had praise for the Guardian, and Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore interviewed one of its editors about the lonely journey of covering the phone hacking story. — HuffPo aggregation under the microscope: A lively discussion about the rights and wrongs of aggregation developed last week out of a column by Ad Age media critic Simon Dumenco, who complained that the Huffington Post had extensively summarized one of his posts, buried the link to the original, and — contrary to Arianna Huffington's argument that her site benefits those they aggregate by sending them readers — gave him just 57 page views. The Huffington Post responded by apologizing and suspending the article's writer. HuffPo business editor Peter Goodman told Adweek the piece was a fully formed article when it should have been a simple introduction and a link, but Dumenco responded to the apology by arguing that the writer did nothing out of the ordinary — this is just how HuffPo tells its writers to do it. Dumenco's point was echoed by several others: The Awl's Choire Sicha said the suspended writer was doing what she was taught, Gawker's Ryan Tate, drawing on a revealing quote from a former HuffPo writer, made the same point: "This is pretty ridiculous, given HuffPo's systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people's news articles." British journalist Kevin Anderson called HuffPo's summary-heavy aggregation "a pretty cynical strategy," and paidContent's Staci Kramer said HuffPo needs to respect its sources, rather than treating a link as a favor. Gabe Rivera, whose news site, Techmeme, was compared to HuffPo favorably by Dumenco, looked for terms to distinguish what his site does from what HuffPo does. Poynter's Julie Moos said some measure of originality will always make for better journalism and a better business model than heavy aggregation, and ZDNet's Tom Foremski pined for the old blogging mentality whose goal was to add value. In a short podcast, author Steven Rosenbaum said this is a logical time to step back and evaluate exactly what constitutes ethical aggregation. There were a few dissenters, though: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and Slate's Jack Shafer both argued that the type of aggregation that HuffPo does has been around for ages in traditional media (especially in Britain, according to Forbes' Tim Worstall). In fact, Shafer said, news orgs could learn a something valuable from the Huffington Post: "That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight." — Comparing Google+, Facebook, and Twitter: It's been just about three weeks since Google+ launched, and Google's new social network is growing like a weed, with estimates of as many as 10 million users so far. (Its number of active users may soon be approaching Twitter's figures.) Google+ news has dominated Twitter, and Google's also working on integrating it with Gmail. With Plus' incredible growth, tech observers have been going back and forth about what social network Google+ is disrupting most. PCWorld's Megan Geuss wondered whether Google+ and Facebook can coexist, and PC Magazine's John Dvorak posited that all the excitement about Google+ is more or less just pent-up frustration with Facebook. The New York Times' David Pogue and Technology Review's Paul Boutin both compared Google+ favorably to Facebook, largely because of its superior privacy controls (though GigaOM's Mathew Ingram pointed out that it may not be a privacy improvement for some people). Meanwhile, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan said Google+ is more comparable to Twitter, then went ahead and made a thorough, smart comparison between the two. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal said Google+ might end up being more conversational than Twitter, which he called more of a call-and-response: Google+ "won't be as good at connecting people to information or each other quickly, but it might be better at longer form discussions and whatever we call the process by which people pull reasoned thoughts from their networks into public discourse." Hutch Carpenter said Google+ resembles both Facebook and Twitter, and Computer World's Mike Elgan wrote that it'll disrupt just about everything. Still, Google+ has its limits: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick explained why he'd never move his personal blog there as some are doing, and Instapaper's Marco Arment and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor both urged readers to keep a space for their own online identity outside of spaces like Google+ or Facebook. For journalists feeling out Google+, Meranda Watling of 10,000 Words put together a preliminary guide. — Reading roundup: Here's what else people were talking about this past week: — The newspaper chain MediaNews made a distinctive play for the tablet news market last week, announcing the launch of TapIn, a location-based news app made specifically for tablets. It'll start in the Bay Area in partnership with the San Jose Mercury News. Ken Doctor, Jeff Sonderman, and Mathew Ingram all wrote about what makes it worth watching. — The Economist continued running pieces all week in its series on the future of the news industry. You can check out several writers'reasons for optimism or read the opening statements in an ongoing debate between NYU's Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr about whether the Internet has been good for journalism. — Boston Globe developer Andy Boyle made his pitch for young journalists to go into web development, or as he put it, "learn to make the internets." — Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together two great social media how-to's for journalists: One on verifying information on social media, and the other on strategies for engagement on Facebook. — Finally, NYU's Clay Shirky gave us another thoughtful essay on the unbundling of news and why the news ecosystem needs to be chaotic right now. In the end, though, here's what he believes news should be: "News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market"; "news has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now"; and "news has to be free, because it has to spread."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:30:10 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=841

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 8, 2011.] Google's biggest social effort yet: This is a two-week edition of This Week in Review, so most of our news comes from last week, rather than this week. The biggest of those stories was the launch of Google+, Google's latest and most substantial foray into the social media landscape. TechCrunch had one of the first and best explanations of what Google+ is all about, and Wired's Steven Levy wrote the most comprehensive account of the thinking at Google behind Plus: It's the product of a fundamental philosophical shift from the web as information to the web as people. Of course, the force to be reckoned with in any big social media venture is Facebook, and even though Google told Search Engine Land it's not made to be a Facebook competitor, Google+ was seen by many (including the New York Times) as Google's most ambitious attempt yet to take on Facebook. The design looks a lot like Facebook, and pages for businesses (like Facebook's Fan Pages) are on their way. Longtime tech blogger Dave Winer was unimpressed at the effort to challenge Facebook, and Om Malik of GigaOM said Facebook has nothing to be afraid of in Google+, though All Facebook's Nick O'Neill said Google+'s ubiquity across the web should present a threat to Facebook. But the biggest contrast people drew between Google+ and Facebook was the more intuitive privacy controls built into its Circles feature. Ex-Salon editor Scott Rosenberg wrote a particularly thoughtful post arguing that Google+ more accurately reflects social life than Facebook: "In truth, Facebook started out with an oversimplified conception of social life, modeled on the artificial hothouse community of a college campus, and it has never succeeded in providing a usable or convenient method for dividing or organizing your life into its different contexts." His thought was echoed by j-prof Jeremy Littau (in two posts) and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor. Google's other ventures into social media — Buzz, Wave, Orkut — have fallen flat, so it's somewhat surprising to see that the initial reviews for Google+ were generally positive. Among those enamored with it were TechCrunch's MG Siegler, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, social media guru Robert Scoble, and the Huffington Post's Craig Kanalley (though he wondered about Google's timing). It quickly began sending TechCrunch loads of traffic, and social media marketer Chris Brogan brainstormed 50 ways Google+ could influence the rest of the web. At the same time, there was some skepticism about its Circles function: TechCrunch's Siegler wondered whether people would use it as intended, and ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez said they might not be equipped to handle complicated, changing relationships. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, said Circles look great, but they aren't going to be much use until there's a critical mass of people to put in them. — Google+ and the news: This being a journalism blog, we're most interested in Google+ for what it means for news. As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman pointed out, the aspect of Google+ that seems to have the most potential is its Sparks feature, which allows users to collect recommended news around a specific term or phrase. Former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee said Sparks could fill a valuable niche for news organizations in between Facebook and Twitter — sort of a more customizable, less awkward RSS. The University of Missouri’s KOMU-TV has already used it in a live broadcast, and Breaking News’ Cory Bergman gave a few valuable lessons from that organization’s first week on Google+. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis gave his thoughts on a few potential uses for news: It could be very useful for collaboration and promotion, but not so much for live coverage. Journalism.co.uk's Sarah Marshall listed several of the same uses, plus interviewing and "as a Facebook for your tweeps." Sonderman suggested a few changes to Google+ to make it even more news-friendly, including allowing news org pages and improving the Sparks search and filtering. Still, he saw it as a valuable addition to the online news consumption landscape: "It’s a serendipity engine, and if executed well it could make Google+ an addictive source of news discovery." A bit of Google+-related miscellany before we move on: Social media marketer Christopher Penn gave some tips on measuring Google+, author Neil Strauss condemned the growing culture of Facebook "Likes" (and now Google +1s), and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram offered a rebuttal. — Murdoch kills News of the World: In one of the most surprising media-related moves of the year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. suddenly shut down one of its most prominent properties, the 168-year-old British tabloid News of the World, on Thursday. The decision stemmed from a long-running scandal involving NotW investigators who illegally hacked into the phones of celebrities. This week, the Guardian reported that the hacking extended to the voicemail of a murdered 13-year-old girl and possibly the families of dead soldiers, and that the paper's editor, Rebekah Brooks (now the head of News Corp. in Britain) was informed of some of the hacking. Facing an advertising boycott and Parliamentary opposition, Murdoch's son, James, announced News of the World will close this weekend. (The Guardian has the definitive blow-by-blow of Thursday's events.) It was a desperate move, and as the New York Times, paidContent, and many on Twitter noted, it was almost certainly an attempt to keep the scandal's collateral damage away from Murdoch's proposed BSkyB merger, which was put on hold and possible in jeopardy this week. Though the closing left hundreds of suddenly out-of-work employees, it may prove less damaging in the big picture for News Corp. than you might expect. NotW only published on Sundays, and it's widely suspected that its sister tabloid, the Sun, will simply expand to include a Sunday edition to cover for its absence. As one Guardian editor stated, the move may simply allow News Corp. to streamline its operation and save cash, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds called it a smart business move. (Its stock actually went up after the announcement.) There's plenty that has yet to play out: The Guardian pointed out how evasive James Murdoch's closing letter was, and Brooks, the one that many thought would take the fall for the scandal, is still around. And the investigation is ongoing, with more arrests being made today. According to the New Yorker's Ken Auletta and CUNY's Jeff Jarvis, though, the buck stops with Rupert himself and the culture he created. — Making journalism easier on Twitter: Twitter has been reaching out to journalists for quite some time now through a media blog, but last week it took things a step further and launched Twitter for Newsrooms, a journalist's guide to using Twitter, with tips on reporting, making conversation, and promoting content. The Lab's Justin Ellis gave a quick glimpse into the rationale behind the project. A few people were skeptical: TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis suspected that Twitter's preaching to the choir, arguing that for the journalists who come across Twitter for Newsrooms, Twitter already is a newsroom. The Journal Register's Steve Buttry called it "more promotional than helpful," and suggested some other Twitter primers for journalists. Ad Age's Matthew Creamer added a tongue-in-cheek guide to releasing your anger on Twitter. Meanwhile, the Lab's Megan Garber reported on the ideas of NPR and Andy Carvin for improving Twitter's functionality for reporting, including a kind of real-time influence and credibility score for Twitter sources, and a journalism-oriented meme-tracking tool for developing stories. — Mobile media and tablet users, profiled: There were several studies released in the past two weeks that are worth noting, starting with Pew's report on e-reader and tablet users. Pew found that e-reader ownership is booming, having doubled in six months. The Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran reasoned that e-readers are ahead of tablets right now primarily because they're so much cheaper, and offered ideas for news organizations to take advantage of the explosion of e-reader users. Three other studies related to tablets and mobile media: One study found that a third of tablet users said it's leading them to read print newspapers and magazines less often; another showed that people are reading more on digital media than we think, and mostly in browsers; and a third gave us more evidence that games are still king among mobile apps. — Reading roundup: Bunches of good stuff to look through from the past two weeks. I'll go through it quickly: — Turns out the "digital first" move announced last month by the Guardian also includes the closing of the international editions of the Guardian and Observer. Jeff Jarvis explained what digital first means, but Suw Charman-Anderson questioned the wisdom the Guardian's strategy. The Lab's Ken Doctor analyzed the economics of the Guardian's situation, as well as the Mail and the BBC's. — This week in AOL/Huffington Post news: Business Insider revealed some leaked lackluster traffic numbers for Patch sites, and reported that Patch is undergoing a HuffPo-ization. That prompted Judy Sims and Slate's Jack Shafer to be the latest to rip into Patch's business model, and Shafer followed up to address rebuttals about non-Patch hyperlocal news. — Google+ was the only interesting Google-related news over the past two weeks: The Lab's Megan Garber wrote about Google's bid to transform mobile ads, potential new directions for Google News, and Google highlighting individual authors in search returns. The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan also wrote on Google's ongoing war on "nonsense" content. — A couple of paywall notes: The Times of London reported that it has 100,000 subscribers a year after its paywall went up, and Dorian Benkoil said the New York Times' plan is working well, the Lab's Megan Garber wrote about the Times adding a "share your access" offer to print subscribers. — Three practical posts for journalists: Poynter's Jeff Sonderman has tips for successful news aggregation and personalized news delivery, and British j-prof Paul Bradshaw reported on his experience running his blog through a Facebook Page for a month. — And three bigger-picture pieces to think on: Wetpaint's Ben Elowitz on the shrinking of the non-Facebook web, former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell on the U.S.' place within the global media ecosystem, and the Economist on the role of news organizations in a citizen-driven media world.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:23:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=838

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

This Week in Review: WikiLeaks’ new rivals, Ongo’s aggregation play, and Demand Media makes a splash

Buy Minocycline Without Prescription

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 24, 2011.] The New York Post's iPad block: News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch has developed a reputation for draconian policies toward paid content and the web, and he furthered that pattern this week when News Corp.'s New York Post blocked access to its website from the iPad's Safari browser in an effort to sell more of its iPad apps. A subscription to the app runs .99 per month; access to the website would be free. The reaction on the web was overwhelmingly negative: Tech pioneer Dave Winer accused the Post of "breaking the web," paidContent's Staci Kramer called it "one of the most poorly conceived paywall efforts I’ve come across," and business journalist Adam Tinworth called the move "dictatorial." As Kramer and Examiner.com's Michael Santo noted, the Post left plenty of workarounds for users who don't want to pay up, through alternative browsers like Skyfire. Kramer and Engadget's Dana Wollman also suspected that Murdoch is attempting to recreate the Post as an app-based tabloid like his other major effort, The Daily. (Both are skeptical about the prospects of that plan.) News Corp. does have some good news on the iPad front this week, though: The Post and The Daily are the two highest-grossing publishing apps on the iPad, ranking well ahead of the next-most-lucrative apps — two comic-book apps and Conde Nast's New Yorker and Wired. Poynter's Regina McCombs talked to three other iPad app publishers — CNN, the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record, and Better Homes & Gardens — about how they put their apps together. And the Columbia Journalism Review's Zachary Sniderman compared the iPad's adoption process to that of print periodicals before it: The iPad's sales, he said, "mirror a long trend of historical adoption rates and cultural attitudes: initial enthusiasm for a new platform, slow adoption, and then gradually increasing sales as the population gets habituated to using the new technology." — A fresh round of news innovation: This week was a big one in news innovation, as the Knight Foundation (one of the Lab's funders) announced the 16 winners of the last round of its five-year Knight News Challenge competition. The Lab's Joshua Benton gave a good annotated roundup of the winning entries, which will get a total of .7 million: There are a few names many people will recognize, including former New York Times/ProPublica project DocumentCloud, the AP's (and the Lab's) Jonathan Stray, and the crisis text-mapping service Ushahidi. I would expect profiles of several of the winning projects over the next week or so, and the Lab's Justin Ellis provided the first with a look at the Chicago Tribune's PANDA, which aims to help newsrooms analyze data more easily. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noticed the data journalism theme running through the winning entries, and elsewhere, the Daily Dot's Nicholas White opined on the importance of data in journalism. Benton's post also included a glance at what's next for the News Challenge, as well as highlights of what has and hasn't gone well over the News Challenge's short history from a recently released internal review. Some of the main challenges: Underestimated difficulty of citizen journalism and news game projects, problems with accurate cost budgeting, and a slow timetable. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman also looked back at some of the lessons learned from the News Challenge. The Knight Foundation also announced a three-year, .76 million investment in MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, which named Berkman Center researcher Ethan Zuckerman its new director. The Lab's Andrew Phelps talked to Zuckerman about where the center is headed, and Zuckerman looked at his goals in a post of his own. Mathew Ingramwondered whether the center can help with the ongoing reinvention of local journalism. — Two legal wins for aggregators: Rulings were handed down this week in two cases that probably only media-law nerds have following, but both have big implications for online news aggregation and link journalism. In the first case, a federal court ruled that a financial site can publish analysts' stock tips immediately, a blow to a legal principle called the "hot news doctrine" that protects certain facts ("hot news") from being republished for a short period of time. (Here's a great explainer of the case from last year.) This was one of those rulings where everyone declares victory: The court actually upheld the validity of the hot news doctrine in the Internet/aggregation era, but said it didn't apply in this case — the analysts are newsmakers and the website is the news breaker, the judge wrote. As Dealbook noted, the lawyer for Google and Twitter (who filed anti-hot news doctrine briefs) called it "a great decision for the free flow of information in the new media age," while the pro-hot news AP called it "a victory for the news media and the public." But as paidContent's Joe Mullin argued, it looks as though this decision will ultimate weaken the hot news doctrine. In the other case, the copyright enforcement firm Righthaven had its lawsuit on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal dismissed. Righthaven had sued a message-board user for reposting a 19-paragraph Review-Journal editorial, but the judge ruled that the posting was protected under fair use because the editorial only contained five paragraphs of purely original opinions and because it was posted for noncommercial reasons. — A renewed debate over anonymity: There have been a handful of streams of discussion regarding anonymity online over the past few weeks that converged a bit this week, and I thought it might be helpful to summarize a couple of them briefly for you. Two weeks ago, a supposed lesbian blogger in Syria was unmasked as a middle-aged American grad student, prompting thoughtful responses from people like the Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman and on the role of participatory media and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and the Berkman Center's Jillian York on the continued need for anonymity. And last week, a couple photographed kissing in the streets amid riots in Vancouver was identified online and making the mainstream-media rounds within days, prompting questions about the end of anonymity by writers like the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Salon's Drew Grant. Meanwhile, former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard decried anonymous online commenting, calling it "faux democracy" and urging news organizations to require commenters to use their real names. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram drew on several of those developments to echo Gillmor's and York's defenses of anonymity, arguing that it's been a key part of healthy democracy, allowing people to speak to the powerful without fear of reprisal. (The AP's Jonathan Stray called it "the digital analog of right to free assembly.") "We shouldn’t toss that kind of principle aside so lightly just because we want to cut down on irritating comments from readers, or stop the occasional blogger from pretending to be someone they are not," Ingram wrote. — Reading roundup: Here's what else happened at the intersection of journalism and technology this week: — Outgoing New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who's done a fair amount of Twitter-tweaking over the past month or so, gave an interview to Reuters in which he said the idea that he's opposed to social media is a misconception. But sociologist Zeynep Tufekci took issue with his idea that social media use leads to less time with "real-life" friends, and when Keller asked for evidence, she let him have it. The Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran also defended social media's usefulness to journalists with some new Pew data. — This Week in AOL: Two more former employees gave their own horror stories about working there — one a writer, the other from sales. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong also said he's considering paid content as part of the company's continued revamp, the Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum pondered the AOL Way and the journalistic "hamster wheel," and Poynter's Steve Myers said comparisons between the Huffington Post and the New York Times are unfounded. — Another potential player in the ongoing long-form nonfiction renaissance, Byliner, launched this week. The Lab and Poynter ran previews. — Finally, the interesting pieces on the FCC's recent report on the future of local news continue to trickle out. Here's a pointed analysis by the folks at Free Press and a two-part Columbia Journalism Review interview with the report's lead writer, Steven Waldman.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:05:59 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=815

Buy Adipex Without Prescription

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 27, 2011.] Censorship, the law, and Twitter: If we hadn't already learned how social media are opening the traditional media's gatekeeping role to the masses, we got a pretty good object lesson this week in Britain. Here's what happened: To keep the British tabloids from digging into an alleged affair with a reality TV star, Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs took out a British court provision called a super-injunction that prohibits media from identifying him and reporting on both the story and the very fact that a super-injunction exists. But the super-injunction was no match for Facebook, Twitter, and soccer forums, where thousands of people talked about Giggs and the affair in spite of (and because of) the order. Since then, a Scottish newspaper and a member of Parliament have both named Giggs, rendering the super-injunction essentially ineffective and causing quite a bit of handwringing over whether gag orders are a lost cause in the Twitter age, and whether or not that's a good thing. Giggs sued Twitter for the breach, and some members of Parliament started looking for ways to control the site. Prime Minister David Cameron said Twitter made Britain's injunctions "unfair" and "unsustainable" for traditional media and urged Parliament to change them. Some people, including World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and the Guardian's Richard Hillgrove, said the problem lies with Twitter, not the law, with Hillgrove (rather absurdly) suggesting a delay mechanism to monitor posts before they go up: "Twitter and Facebook are not blank sheets of paper. They are media publishers like any other." Others faulted the law instead: At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said it allows the wealthy to play by different rules, and the Telegraph'sHarry Mount said that thanks to the web, "a form of people power has been effectively absorbed into that new body of privacy law." The Vancouver Sun's Mario Canseco documented the failure of gag orders in the Internet age in Canada, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM advised courts and governments to quit trying to enforce antiquated laws, saying they "may not like the implications of a totally distributed real-time information network, but they are going to have to start living with it sooner rather than later." Then, of course, there's the question of whether the anonymous online super-injunction violators have any legal repercussions to worry about. As the New York Times noted, Twitter has been resistant to turning over its users' identities in the past, though a Twitter official said this week it will hand over user info to the authorities if it's legally required to. But even with Twitter's compliance, there would still be hurdles to clear in identifying users, the Telegraph explained. — iPad channels for big and small media: Several big-media publications neared or hit iPad milestones this week: On stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, The Daily's Greg Clayman said it's nearing a million downloads since it was launched in January. Clayman wouldn't say how many paid subscribers the News Corp. iPad-only publication has (a far more interesting figure in determining The Daily's viability), but Adweek's Lucia Moses said The Daily will announce its number of paid downloads — it only started charging in March — once it hits a "target level." Meanwhile, Wired and GQ were made available for in-app subscriptions through Apple App Store this week, after their owner, Condé Nast, became one of the first major publishers to strike a deal with Apple for in-app subscriptions earlier this month. Another major publication, Playboy, launched an iPad subscription outside the App Store, because it obviously has some difficulty complying with Apple's "no nudity" policy. Playboy's app is essentially an iPad-optimized website, which might seem like a tempting option for publishers who don't want to deal with Apple's restrictions, but as Mashable and GigaOM explained, Playboy might be uniquely positioned to pull this off where others can't. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram looked at those cases and weighed the pluses and minuses for publishers of getting into bed with Apple. Of course, big publishers aren't the only ones getting into the iPad game: At paidContent, Ashley Norris, CEO of a small publishing company that just released an iPad app, argued that indie publishers could play a key role in developing the tablet magazine. Flipboard is a pretty ideal model for those publishers: It's valued at 0 million, and SiliconAngle's Tom Foremski said it exemplifies the current en vogue tech-bubble business plan: "find free content and organize it into a useful interface." That niche might not play as big of a part in the iPad market as we think, though: As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted via ReadWriteWeb, news apps make up only 3% of all the apps in the App Store. — Driving more traffic from Facebook: Facebook has been working hard lately to cozy up to news organizations, and this week it provided some statistics that may have some of those organizations looking more closely at integrating Facebook into their sites. According to stats Search Engine Land got from Facebook (so grain of salt, etc.), the average media site integrated with Facebook has gotten a 300% jump in Facebook referral traffic, and ABC News, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post have all reportedly doubled their traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins. Meanwhile, Fortune's Peter Lauria talked to Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik about the possibility of news orgs charging on Facebook using Facebook credits, like some Facebook games do now. As it's been known to do, Facebook played a big role in the aftermath of another natural disaster this week when a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. The local newspaper, the Joplin Globe, told Poynter about how they set up a Facebook page to help people find family and friends in the tornado's wake. Elsewhere in social media and news, the New York Times experimented this week with a human-powered Twitter feed, as opposed to its usual mostly automatically driven style. The Times' Liz Heron (and a couple of other newspaper social media editors) talked to Poynter's Jeff Sonderman about their Twitter strategies, and Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words looked at how the experiment changed the Times' Twitter feed. Heron also revealed the Times' informal social media guidelines at the BBC's Social Media Summit: "Use common sense and don't be stupid." — Reading roundup: Not a lot of big future-of-news stories this week, a several smaller things worth keeping an eye on: — Google notified publishers late last week that it's abandoning its project to scan and archive hundreds of years of old newspapers. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes lamented the decision, and Paul Balcerak urged newspapers to pick up where Google left off. — This week's AOL/Huffington Post bits and pieces: Huffington Post Canada has been launched, AOL's Daily Finance has been made over, and some HuffPo staff are reportedly leaving because they're upset with how the AOL/HuffPo marriage has gone so far. Meanwhile, even though AOL's content is free, CEO Tim Armstrong expressed his general belief in paid content online. — Ben Huh of the Cheezburger network of comedy sites announced he's working on what he's calling the Moby Dick Project — an effort to reform the way news is presented and consumed online. ReadWriteWeb gave more details of the type of software he's developing. — A couple of addenda to last week's linking discussion: Former Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry wrote about solving the workflow issue at newspapers, and at the Guardian, Dan Gillmor called out lazy linking — linking to a summary, rather than the original piece — in online aggregation. — CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis made a case for news as conversation and the value of comments, and at 10,000 Words, Alex Schmidt wrote about the way poisonous online comments can affect reporters. — Finally, Canadian media consultant Ken Goldstein issued a paper looking at decline circulation of newspapers in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. He included a possibly remarkably prescient 1964 quotation by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:01:39 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=813

Buy Adalat Without Prescription

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

Buy Casodex Without Prescription

]]> [This week's review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 20, 2011.] Twitter on the brain: Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller got a rise out of a lot of folks online with one of the shortest of his 21 career tweets: "#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss." Keller revealed the purpose of his social experiment this week in a column arguing, in so many words, that Twitter may be dulling your humanity, and probably making you stupid, too. Here's the money quote: "my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity." This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well online. There were a couple strains of reaction: Business Insider's Henry Blodget and All Twitter's Lauren Dugan argued that Twitter may indeed be changing us, but for the good, by helping make previously impossible connections. Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick of Techdirt countered Keller by saying that while Twitter isn't built for deep conversations, it is quite good at providing an entry point for such discussion: "What you see publicly posted on Twitter and Facebook is just the tip of the conversation iceberg," Tsotsis said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, defended Twitter's true social nature, and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci gave a fantastic breakdown of what Twitter does and doesn't do culturally and socially. Two of the most eloquent responses were provided by Nick Bilton, one of Keller's own employees, and by Gizmodo's Mat Honan. Bilton pointed out that our brains have shown a remarkable ability to adapt quickly to new technologies without sacrificing old capacities. (Be sure to check out Keller's response afterward.) Honan made a similar argument: Keller, he said, is confusing the medium with the message, and Twitter, like any technology, is what you make it. "If you choose to do superficial things there, you will have superficial experiences. If you use it to communicate with others on a deeper level, you can have more meaningful experiences that make you smarter, build lasting relationships, and generally enhance your life," Honan wrote. — Google gets more local with news: Google News unveiled a few interesting changes in the past week, starting with the launch of "News near you." Google has sorted news by location for a while now, but this feature will allow smartphone users to automatically get local news wherever they are. ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski explained why newspapers should be worried about Google moving further onto their local-news turf, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram criticized newspapers for not coming up with like this themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, on the other hand, said Google's feature is still in need of some human curation to go with its algorithmic aggregation. That's an area in which local newspapers can still dominate, he said, but it'll require some technological catchup, as well as a willingness to get over fears about linking to competitors. Another change, not publicized by Google News but spotted by the folks at Search Engine Land, was the addition of an option to allow users to filter out blogs and press releases from their results. This raised the question, what exactly does Google consider a blog? Google told Search Engine Land it relies on a variety of factors to make that decision, especially self-identification. Mathew Ingram ripped this classification, and urged Google to put everything that contains news together in Google News and let readers sort it out. — Fitting linking into news' workflow: A discussion about linking has been simmering on Twitter on and off over the past few weeks, and it began to come together into something useful this week. This round of the conversation started with a post by web thinker and scholar Doc Searls, who wondered why news organizations don't link out more often. In the comments, the Chicago Tribune's Brian Boyer suggested that one reason is that many newspapers' CMS's and workflows are print-centric, making linking logistically difficult. CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson responded that the workflow issue isn't much of an excuse, saying, as he put it on Twitter: "At this point 'linking' has been around for twenty years. The fact that this is STILL a workflow issue is almost worse than not caring." This kicked off a sprawling debate on Twitter, aptly chronicled via Storify by Mathew Ingram and Alex Byers. Ingram also wrote a post responding to a few of the themes of resistance of links, particularly the notion that information on the web is inferior to information gained by old-fashioned reporting. British journalist Kevin Anderson took on the workflow issue in particular, noting how outdated many newspaper CMS's are and challenging them to catch up technologically: "It’s an industrial workflow operating in a digital age. It’s really only down to ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ thinking that allows such a patently inefficient process to persist." — AOL's continued makeover: Another week, another slew of personnel moves at AOL. PaidContent's David Kaplan reported that AOL is hiring "a bunch" of new (paid) editors and shuffling some current employees around after its layoff of hundreds this spring. Overall, Kaplan wrote, this is part of the continued effort to put the Huffington Post's stamp on AOL's editorial products. One of the AOL entities most affected by the shifts is Seed, which had been a freelance network, but will now fall under AOL's advertising area as a business-to-business product. Saul Hansell, who was hired in 2009 to run Seed, is moving to HuffPo to edit its new "Big News" features. In a blog post, Hansell talked about what this means for HuffPo and for Seed. Meanwhile, the company is also rolling out AOL Industry, a set of B2B sites covering energy, defense, and government. But wait, that's not all: AOL's Patch is launching 33 new sites in states targeting the 2012 election. The hyperlocal news site Street Fight also reported that Patch is urging its editors to post more often, and a group of independent local news sites is banding together to tell the world that they are not Patch, nor anything like it. — Reading roundup: As always, plenty of other stuff get to this week. — We mentioned a Pew report's reference to the Drudge Report's influence in last week's review, and this week the New York Times' David Carr marveled at Drudge's continued success without many new-media bells and whistles. Poynter's Julie Moos looked at Drudge's traffic over the years, while the Washington Post disputed Pew's numbers. ZDNet's David Gewirtz had five lessons Drudge can teach the rest of the media world. — A few paid-content items: A Nielsen survey on what people are willing to pay for various mobile services, Poynter's Rick Edmonds on the New York Times' events marketing for its pay plan, and the Lab's Justin Ellis on paid-content lessons from small newspapers. — A couple of tablet-related items: Next Issue Media, a joint effort of five publishers to sell magazines on tablets, released its first set of magazines on Google Android-powered Samsung Galaxy. And here at the Lab, Ken Doctor expounded on the iPad as the "missing link" in news' digital evolution. — Columbia University announced it will launch a local news site this summer focusing on accountability journalism, and the Lab's Megan Garber gave some more details about what Columbia's doing with it. — The Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Kirchner had an interesting conversation with Slate's David Plotz about Slate's aggregation efforts, and in response, Reuters' Felix Salmon made the case for valuing aggregation skills in journalists. — This weekend's think piece is a musing by Maria Bustillos at The Awl on Wikipedia, Marshall McLuhan, communal knowledge-making, and the fate of the expert. Enjoy.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/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-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:20:17 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=920

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 18, 2011.] A fight for online freedom: A U.S. House committee hearing brought an important three-week old bill on Internet censorship to the spotlight this week. The Stop Online Piracy Act (a companion of the Senate's Protect IP Act), would allow content creators to shut down websites on which people hosted unauthorized copyrighted content, or linked to sites that did. The Atlantic has a good, quick explainer, and the advocacy group Fight for the Future has a sharp video illustrating its implications. If you want to go in-depth, Techdirt has the most thorough continuing coverage of the bill. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that it seems as though pretty much everyone on the Internet hates this bill. Bunches of Internet giants oppose it — Google was a major testifier at this week's hearing (though its rep referenced the WikiLeaks payment blocks favorably, which concerned some) — Tumblr ran an online campaign against the bill by mock-censoring its users' dashboard screens, and loads of online commentators howled against it. Here's why they're so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow for free speech on the web. The New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: "The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can't control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken." As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, you can't have the explosion of creative production, individual empowerment, and democratic potential of the Internet without the downsides of rampant copyright infringement. If you take away the latter, he argued, you take away the former, too. And venture capitalist Brad Burnham made the interesting point that the architecture of the web is based on the assumption that there are more good actors out there than bad, an idea that this bill runs squarely against. This bill poses some potential problems for journalism, too. Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words outlined some of those issues, pointing out that articles could be censored for linking to sites with piracy information, and that citizen journalism and innovation could be stifled. — Twitter as one-way street: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report this week on the way news organizations use Twitter, and the results weren't pretty: News orgs, they found, were using Twitter predominantly as a way to simply broadcast their stories online, not taking much advantage of Twitter's interactive capabilities or its ability to link readers to a wide variety of sources. PEJ said the behavior was reminiscent of the link-phobic early days of the web, and the Lab's Megan Garber called it a "glorified RSS feed." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was particularly troubled by how little news orgs and their journalists asked readers for news tips and feedback, and media consultant Terry Heaton said this Twitter-as-headline-feed pattern among news orgs is evidence that it really is all about the money. "If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web," he wrote. "When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else." Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, tied the study to another Pew study that reinforced the value of personal recommendations over impersonal ones. There was also quite a bit of talk on Twitter about the study's weaknesses, led largely by media scholars like USC's Robert Hernandez. Still, one j-prof, Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, pointed out that this report's findings do echo those of several previous studies, both academic and professional. — Occupy Wall Street and scooping the wire: New York police swooped in earlier this week to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which in itself wasn't surprising: Similar sweeps have been done in numerous American cities. What drew particular attention among future-of-news folks was the way they did it — by blocking journalists from viewing the action and even arresting 26 of them across the country, of whom seven worked full-time for traditional news orgs and seven had NYPD press credentials. The New York Times and the Atlantic have the most thorough accounts of what went on, and you can check out video of one of the reporter arrests at the Times' The Local. One interesting side story to emerge from those arrests began when AP staff members tweeted that their AP colleagues had been arrested before the news hit the wire. The AP sent out a stern memo admonishing its journalists to beat their own wire reports on Twitter, prompting the New York Times' Brian Stelter to ask, "Shouldn't the wire speed up?!" GigaOM's Mathew said news orgs should consider Twitter the newswire now, and Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that policies like the AP's (and Reuters') are the products of head-in-the-sand thinking. (The AP sent out another memo the next day explaining that its initial memo was more about the safety of its arrested reporters than anything.) Elsewhere in Occupy-related media and tech ideas: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal kicked off a series of posts on technology's role in the Occupy protests with a creative description of Occupy as a type of API, ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell praised Storify for its role in Occupy coverage, and New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard explained why she's ditching the objectivity-based paradigm of the mainstream media to get involved with Occupy. — Romenesko and online attribution: A few of the loose ends from Jim Romenesko's unceremonious departure from the Poynter Institute were tied up since last week's review: Poynter renamed Romenesko's blog MediaWire, and in an interview, Romenesko shed some light on his insistence on resigning: "I worked there for 12 years, and I'm supposed to spend my final days being supervised, having a babysitter, whatever? It just seemed a little bit humiliating." Most notably, the Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry published the article resulting from the reporting that started this bizarre episode. In it, she argued that the attribution problems aren't limited to Romenesko, but are in part of a function of Poynter's move to longer — and, as she put it — "over-aggregated" posts. Several Poynter faculty members also weighed in, with Roy Peter Clark providing the sharpest take: "The standards of attribution we still apply in print may in fact be outdated in the age of sampling, file sharing, and mash-ups." Other media critics continued to defend Romenesko (Reuters' Jack Shafer) and rip Poynter (Terry Heaton, Felix Salmon). The Gender Report's Jasmine Linabary, meanwhile, wondered why we weren't seeing much attention paid to women commenting on the Romenesko story. — Amazon releases the Kindle Fire: Amazon released its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week, and the reviews were mixed. (PaidContent has a quick roundup of some of the big reviewers.) It got panned by a few places (most notably Wired), but the general sentiment was that while the Fire can't match up the iPad and some of the other top-end tablets, it's still a decent deal at 0. As the New York Times' David Pogue put it: "The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish." A few other notes regarding the Fire: Time Inc. had five of its magazines on the Fire at its launch after some protracted negotiating, and Amazon has made the Fire's source code available to developers to encourage software experimentation. Wired's Steven Levy, meanwhile, had an in-depth discussion with Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the state of the company. — Reading roundup: Bunches and bunches of interesting little stories this week. Here are a few we haven't hit yet: — A federal judge ruled late last week that Twitter has to hand over information about possible WikiLeaks supporters, one of whom, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, expressed her outrage in the Guardian over the decision's threat to civil rights. ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram were also among those concerned about the future of privacy online. — A few advertising-related tidbits: Reuters' Felix Salmon summarized a fascinating talk he gave on the woeful state of online advertising and what to do about it, Wired looked at Twitter's efforts to make serendipity pay as an advertising model, and the Lab examined newspapers' advertising efforts on Twitter. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an innovative cross-platform interactive ad that also mimicked its news content, which led ACES' Charles Apple and the Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler to question its ethics. The Times told Hendler the ad couldn't realistically be confused with actual Times content. — The Columbia Journalism Review explored a crucial issue in the changing news ecosystem — what happens to all the communities that aren't hubs for innovation? — with a series of pieces on Modesto, California. — Also in CJR, Megan Garber wrote a fascinating article looking back at how journalism has viewed its future over the years. The University of Colorado's Steve Outing decided to add to that tradition of journalistic fortune-telling with his set of predictions about what online news will look like 20 years from now.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:40 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=905

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

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

Buy Adipex Without Prescription

]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] A heavyweight enters the tablet ring: Amazon became the latest company to jump into the tablet market this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a 9 tablet that will run on Google's Android system. It's a 7" touch-screen tablet that's essentially a knockoff of the BlackBerry Playbook — much smaller and cheaper than Apple's iPad. Amazon also revealed three new Kindle models ranging from to 9, two of them touch-screen, as well as a new Kindle Fire-only web browser, Silk (more on that at the LA Times). The two most comprehensive early looks at the Fire came from Wired's Steven Levy and Bloomberg's Brad Stone. Levy looked more at the device itself, describing it as a way for Amazon to spotlight its non-book media library and saying its biggest challenge is to Netflix. Stone looked more at the corporate strategy behind the Fire, noting that it "funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing." (Sounds like a certain other tablet we know.) By the end of launch day, several tech sites like TechCrunch and ZDNet had already declared the Fire the winner of the hypercompetitive Android tablet market, and Ad Age said it would soon have tablet consumption taking off. The bigger question, then, was whether the Fire would present the first real threat to Apple's iPad. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal summed up the Fire's challenge to the iPad — smaller, cheaper, and the first media experience as thoroughly integrated as Apple's App Store. As the Atlantic's Alesh Houdek put it, the Fire may do most everything tablet owners really want, only for a lot less than the iPad. But ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow said the Fire can't match up to the iPad, and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and paidContent's Tom Krazit both said it's not even directly competing with the iPad — it's in a more utilitarian market, where the iPad is more about luxury. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that to content producers, Amazon and Apple are going to look very similar: They both see their devices as ways to sell their own content, which puts them in competition with the content providers themselves. The Fire also launched with a newsstand, with big magazine publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith among the first to sign deals with Amazon, under similar terms to Apple's 30% cut of revenue. (News Corp. also signed a deal to put Fox TV shows on the Fire.) The New York Observer's Emily Witt noted that the Fire could be the mobile-content Apple competitor publishers have been looking for, and the Lab's Martin Langeveld said the Fire will present a fresh disruption for content providers, furthering the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing and eliminating the need for third-party advertising. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman posed several questions journalists should be asking about the Fire, looking at things like paid content, customer data, and app development. — Objections to 'frictionless sharing': Reactions continued to pour in about Facebook's latest overhaul, announced late last week. Many of those concerns centered around the same theme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's brave new world of ubiquitous, "frictionless" sharing. The New York Times' Somini Sengupta and the LA Times' Jessica Guynn gave us a picture of what this world might look like, and Slate's Farhad Manjoo explained why sharing should still be a choice. Needless to say, this brought up another round of complaints about privacy on Facebook: Tech pioneer Dave Winer said Facebook has crossed the privacy Rubicon by seeking out information about you to post to others, rather than just using information you've chosen to share. Entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook can track every page you visit even when you're logged out. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter argued that this type of involuntary sharing should be a concern for every news organization that works with Facebook, and former New York Times developer Michael Donohoe said the Times refused to implement that kind of sharing via Facebook. There was one (non-Facebook) voice countering that the passive sharing isn't that big of a deal: Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. A couple of deeper thoughts on the issue: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote on Facebook as "the Meaning Machine," and media prof Mark Deuze argued that living our lives inside of a mediated environment (like Facebook encourages to) can actually help us to see ourselves as deeply connected to others, if we're willing to let go of our self-absorption. As I touched on a bit earlier, there's also the question of what news organizations should do with Facebook: Gawker's Ryan Tate explained why many media companies are so eager to be part of Facebook's plans (huge audiences, huge amounts of data), and Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik explained at the Lab and at the Online News Association conference how journalists can take advantage of these changes. But Jeff Sonderman was a bit more skeptical, urging news organizations to weigh the costs as well as the benefits. Finally, these changes probably aren't good news for Google and its own network Google+, as Facebook begins collecting loads of valuable personal data that Google can't touch, Mathew Ingram explained. Twitter does its own thing (real-time news) too well to be too worried, Ingram said, but the New York Times' Nick Bilton wrote that Twitter isn't user-friendly enough to be for everyone, as Facebook is. — Media trust and the new local news: The Pew Research Center released two surveys over the past week or so: The first was the latest in a regular series of looks at the American public's views of the press, and results weren't pretty. The press hit record lows in the public's mind in terms of fairness, accuracy, bias, morality, professionalism, and impact on democracy. (Poynter has a good, quick summary.) Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that many of the poll respondents get most of their news from TV, which he said isn't a particularly substantive media diet. "The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs," he wrote. One other nugget: j-prof Alfred Hermida pointed outthat many social media say they get the same news there as on traditional news. The second study examined the platforms on which people get their local news. There were a few different takeaways from this one: The New York Times focused on the fact that a broad range of platforms have joined TV as predominant local news sources, while the LA Times and Poynter's Rick Edmonds centered on the paradox that many people were very dependent on their local newspaper but still wouldn't care much if it were gone. O'Reilly Radar's Alex Howard had a fine analysis of the study, using it as a jumping-off point for a piece on the Internet as the future of local news. Other notes from the data: Broadcasting & Cable looked at the areas where local TV did well, Poynter's Julie Moos noticed that many people follow local news even when nothing big is going on, and paidContent focused on the role of mobile media in local news consumption. — More over-aggregation accusations: The business news site Business Insider announced some happy news late last week — it had recently raised  million in funding. But that announcement prompted a wave of criticism about the ethics of their aggregation efforts. Reuters' Ryan McCarthy laid out the basic accusation: Business Insider, he said, routinely lifts large chunks of stories from other outlets while only providing scant attribution or links. Others, like former Business Insider employee Ben Popper of BetaBeat, echoed the complaint. So did Instapaper founder Marco Arment, who noted how little traffic he gets from Business Insider republishing his stories. Business Insider's Henry Blodget responded twice to Arment, the second time in a massively long, detailed post essentially blaming the aggregation problems on some weird content management system glitches. Based on that post, Reuters' Felix Salmon said Business Insider still falls on the wrong side of "over-aggregation," drawing a distinction between human-edited and automatically driven aggregation pages. There was some praise for Business Insider in light of their funding, though — CNBC.com and the Guardian both looked at what makes the site work so well. — Reading roundup: Other stuff to keep an eye on this week: — The Wall Street Journal changed its website's privacy policy to connect personally identifiable data with browsing history without user permission. Yeah, people weren't crazy about that, especially since the Journal has been one of the big crusaders in reporting on corporate violations of privacy online. Here's New York magazine's and Dan Gillmor's takes. — Google launched Google News Standout, which allows news organizations to flag their top work. The Lab's Megan Garber examined the way it rewards generosity, and Wired's Tim Carmody looked at the increasing integration between Google News and Google+. — This Week in Patch: Patch's local site editors are reportedly being asked to drum up sales leads, and the Batavian's Howard Owens said if you're going to work that hard on local news, you might as well start your own site. Patch President Warren Webster pushed backagainst the criticism. — The Financial Times said its web-based app has been a higher seller than the Apple App Store version, and ReadWriteWeb called it abig early victory for HTML5-based app developers in their battle against Apple. — An update on News Corp.'s daily tablet publication, The Daily: It has about 120,000 weekly readers, well below Rupert Murdoch's targets for it. — Finally, a trio of super helpful/valuable posts for journalists: J-prof Paul Bradshaw wrote on what should make up journalists' network infrastructure online, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia's Jon Whiten gave a guide to making longform writing work online, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman urged news organizations to start building apps that solve problems.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-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-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:43:08 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=860

Buy Casodex Without Prescription

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 5, 2011.] How right do we need to be on Twitter?: It's not particularly uncommon for false information to spread on Twitter under the guise of breaking news, and that's what happened late last week, when several journalists spread the rumor that CNN's Piers Morgan had been suspended from his show as part of the fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal, which turned out to be untrue. This misinformation, however, led to the most interesting discussion on Twitter and accuracy we've seen in a while. It started with Reuters' Felix Salmon, one of those who tweeted the Morgan rumor, defending the practice of quickly tweeting breaking news (false, in some cases) and then quickly correcting it. "Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false," he wrote. While news organizations' official accounts should stick to confirmed reports, individual reporters should be able to tweet unconfirmed information, Salmon said, as long as they attribute it properly and correct it quickly. Several writers objected to this line of reasoning: Fishbowl NY's Chris O'Shea said Salmon should be committed to tweeting true information because the fact that he's seen as a credible news source is the reason people follow him on Twitter in the first place. The Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman countered that Twitter is much closer to publishing than a newsroom meeting: "The reason people feel a bit of embarrassment after making a mistake on Twitter is precisely because it’s so public." And Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review said Salmon's strategy constitutes a reckless disregard for reporters' individual brand and reputation. Others were more sympathetic to Salmon's point. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pushed back against Rieder, arguing that news is a process, not just the publication of a finished product, and Twitter is part of that process. Salmon's editor at Reuters, Anthony DeRosa, who also tweeted the Morgan rumor, agreed with Salmon that Twitter is a newsroom, but vowed to be more careful to tweet verified information. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry, meanwhile, said that the dichotomy between being first and being right is a false one for journalists — and that journalists should strive for both. — A new tool for the new newsroom: Chartbeat, which does real-time analytics for websites, launched a news-oriented version of its tool last week called Newsbeat. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together a good overview of the service, which includes more detail about traffic trends and sources than Chartbeat. In an interview with GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, Chartbeat's Tony Haile answered the objection that this type of data will just lead to a "tyranny of the popular," arguing instead that the service may instead show journalists how they're underestimating their audiences, or how they can repackage news stories to make them more understandable to readers. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal provided an example from his own experience, noting that Chartbeat has shown that a surprising number of offbeat longform stories there generate big traffic. Newsbeat, he said, could help the mass of news sources fighting for attention online each find their sweet spot. "I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet," he said. At Wired, Tim Carmody emphasized the real-time nature of the information, noting that the need for that kind of information is growing as news organizations are increasingly editing and publishing in real time, too. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber was intrigued by the fact that Newsbeat offers individualized dashboards for each writer and editor's content. The feature, she reasoned, demonstrates the increased encouragement of entrepreneurialism within the modern newsroom: "Increasingly, the gates of production are swinging open to journalists throughout, if not fully across, the newsroom. That’s a good thing. It’s also a big thing. And Newsbeat is reflecting it." — A truly daily tablet publication: Seems almost every other week we have a new entry into the tablet news market; this week it's AOL, which launched its daily tablet magazine Editions this week. All Things Digital and Poynter have good overviews of what the new publication is: Notably, it's delivered to your tablet just once a day (at the time of your choosing), with a set ending page, and without any updates. It's big on personalization, tailoring news to each user a bit like Pandora, and it also includes some local news and, as Poynter noted, primarily aims to recreate the print experience (a fake mailing label, even!). To the people behind Editions, its lack of updates and finite, print-like interface are assets: As one of them told the New York Times, "For a lot of people, [continual updating] becomes oppressive. This is not tapping you on the shoulder all the time." But at TechCrunch (which is also owned by AOL), Erick Schonfeld was skeptical, asserting that if he feels like he's getting day-old news on Editions, he'll just stick to the web. "News apps need to be as current as the Web. Those are just table stakes," he wrote. Mashable's Lauren Indvik, on the other hand, was rather impressed, saying the finiteness of the magazine provides a nice contrast to the unruliness of the web. — The scandal goes stateside: A couple of updates on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal: The story is beginning to migrate across the Atlantic, as attention begins to shift toward several accusations of spying made years ago against News Corp. holdings in the United States. Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke this story open earlier this summer, was reportedly in the States this week investigating News Corp. At New York magazine, Frank Rich urged Americans to look more closely into Murdoch's behavior here: "We’ve become so inured to Murdoch tactics over the years—and so many people in public life have been frightened, silenced, co-opted, or even seduced by them—that we have minimized his impact exactly the way his publicists hoped we would, downgrading News Corp. misbehavior merely to tabloid vulgarity and right-wing attack-dog politics." Two other notes: The News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is surveying subscribers about its image in light of the phone hacking scandal, and the American Journalism Review's John Morton said that for all his faults, Rupert Murdoch's heart is in newspapers, something he appreciates. — Reading roundup: Several things journalists and educators might find useful this week: — Some smaller papers in the Lee Enterprises chain are going to be trying out metered-model online pay plans, which include a small charge for the website even for print subscribers. Poynter's Rick Edmonds explained why. And at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at how the economics of circulation and advertising are moving online. — There are still a few places where print is still king — among the wealthy, for instance, as data from this Ad Age survey show. — A few great how-to's and suggestions: Journalism.co.uk's SEO primer for journalists; Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams' six proposals for journalism education; and a quick guide to data journalism from the Guardian. — Finally, media analyst Alan Mutter made a strong case for why newspapers' business model will never stabilize and urged them to begin "intelligently, and speedily, de-stabilizing their enterprises." It's a case that's been made many times before, but one that probably needs to be heard again.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:07:14 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=854

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 18, 2011.] News Corp.'s scandal keeps growing: Rupert Murdoch might have hoped News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal would die down when he closed the British tabloid News of the World last week, but it only served to fuel the issue's explosion. This past week, the scandal's collateral damage spread to News Corp.'s proposed takeover of the British broadcaster BSkyB: Faced with increasing pressure from the British government and the revelation that News Corp. journalists tried to get private records of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, News Corp. dropped the BSkyB bid, which had been a huge part of the company's U.K. strategy. Plenty of other problems are cropping up for News Corp., too. The top lawyer for its U.K. newspaper branch, News International, quit. The company's stock lost billion in four business days at one point. A pre-existing U.S. shareholders' suit expanded to cover the hacking scandal. The Murdochs have to testify before British Parliament this week about the scandal, and the FBI started investigating U.S.-related aspects of the issue. That's all in addition to the ongoing problems News Corp. faces, as detailed by Poynter's Rick Edmonds. The scandal has led quite a few writers to criticize the culture that Murdoch has created at News Corp. Capital New York's Tom McGeveran and Reuters' John Lloyd railed on Murdoch and News Corp.'s character, Carl Bernstein called this Murdoch's Watergate, and the Observer's editorial board called for systemic reforms in Britain so Murdoch's influence can never be so strong. Members of the Bancroft family said they wouldn't have sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch in 2007 if they'd have known the hacking was going on. On the other hand, the New York Times pointed out that sleazy British tabloid tactics are hardly limited to Murdoch, and media critic Howard Kurtz noted that they're very much alive in the U.S. mainstream press, too. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen defended Murdoch, saying he's been good for journalism on the whole, and Gawker's John Cook defended those tabloid reporting tactics. Meanwhile, j-prof Jeff Jarvis and the Telegraph's Toby Harnden urged the British government not to respond by enacting more regulation. News Corp.'s retreat might not stop with News of the World and BSkyB. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff and others have reported that the company's execs are debating whether to get out of Britain's newspaper business entirely, and several observers chimed in to say that might actually make a good deal of business sense. Media analyst Ken Doctor said News International is losing steam, and the Financial Times' John Gapper said newspapers are becoming far more trouble than they're worth to Murdoch. Not only that, but the New Yorker's John Cassidy said dropping his U.K. newspapers could let Murdoch revive his BSkyB bid, and Jeff Jarvis speculated that when Murdoch chooses between the power that the papers give him and the money saved by getting rid of them, he'll choose the money. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch called the rumors of a newspaper sell-off "rubbish." But just because News of the World and News International may be dead and dying, that doesn't mean newspapers as a whole are, argued David Carr of the New York Times. As he noted, it was the Guardian's dogged reporting that finally broke this story open. Murdoch "prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect," Carr wrote. The Atlantic also had praise for the Guardian, and Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore interviewed one of its editors about the lonely journey of covering the phone hacking story. — HuffPo aggregation under the microscope: A lively discussion about the rights and wrongs of aggregation developed last week out of a column by Ad Age media critic Simon Dumenco, who complained that the Huffington Post had extensively summarized one of his posts, buried the link to the original, and — contrary to Arianna Huffington's argument that her site benefits those they aggregate by sending them readers — gave him just 57 page views. The Huffington Post responded by apologizing and suspending the article's writer. HuffPo business editor Peter Goodman told Adweek the piece was a fully formed article when it should have been a simple introduction and a link, but Dumenco responded to the apology by arguing that the writer did nothing out of the ordinary — this is just how HuffPo tells its writers to do it. Dumenco's point was echoed by several others: The Awl's Choire Sicha said the suspended writer was doing what she was taught, Gawker's Ryan Tate, drawing on a revealing quote from a former HuffPo writer, made the same point: "This is pretty ridiculous, given HuffPo's systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people's news articles." British journalist Kevin Anderson called HuffPo's summary-heavy aggregation "a pretty cynical strategy," and paidContent's Staci Kramer said HuffPo needs to respect its sources, rather than treating a link as a favor. Gabe Rivera, whose news site, Techmeme, was compared to HuffPo favorably by Dumenco, looked for terms to distinguish what his site does from what HuffPo does. Poynter's Julie Moos said some measure of originality will always make for better journalism and a better business model than heavy aggregation, and ZDNet's Tom Foremski pined for the old blogging mentality whose goal was to add value. In a short podcast, author Steven Rosenbaum said this is a logical time to step back and evaluate exactly what constitutes ethical aggregation. There were a few dissenters, though: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and Slate's Jack Shafer both argued that the type of aggregation that HuffPo does has been around for ages in traditional media (especially in Britain, according to Forbes' Tim Worstall). In fact, Shafer said, news orgs could learn a something valuable from the Huffington Post: "That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight." — Comparing Google+, Facebook, and Twitter: It's been just about three weeks since Google+ launched, and Google's new social network is growing like a weed, with estimates of as many as 10 million users so far. (Its number of active users may soon be approaching Twitter's figures.) Google+ news has dominated Twitter, and Google's also working on integrating it with Gmail. With Plus' incredible growth, tech observers have been going back and forth about what social network Google+ is disrupting most. PCWorld's Megan Geuss wondered whether Google+ and Facebook can coexist, and PC Magazine's John Dvorak posited that all the excitement about Google+ is more or less just pent-up frustration with Facebook. The New York Times' David Pogue and Technology Review's Paul Boutin both compared Google+ favorably to Facebook, largely because of its superior privacy controls (though GigaOM's Mathew Ingram pointed out that it may not be a privacy improvement for some people). Meanwhile, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan said Google+ is more comparable to Twitter, then went ahead and made a thorough, smart comparison between the two. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal said Google+ might end up being more conversational than Twitter, which he called more of a call-and-response: Google+ "won't be as good at connecting people to information or each other quickly, but it might be better at longer form discussions and whatever we call the process by which people pull reasoned thoughts from their networks into public discourse." Hutch Carpenter said Google+ resembles both Facebook and Twitter, and Computer World's Mike Elgan wrote that it'll disrupt just about everything. Still, Google+ has its limits: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick explained why he'd never move his personal blog there as some are doing, and Instapaper's Marco Arment and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor both urged readers to keep a space for their own online identity outside of spaces like Google+ or Facebook. For journalists feeling out Google+, Meranda Watling of 10,000 Words put together a preliminary guide. — Reading roundup: Here's what else people were talking about this past week: — The newspaper chain MediaNews made a distinctive play for the tablet news market last week, announcing the launch of TapIn, a location-based news app made specifically for tablets. It'll start in the Bay Area in partnership with the San Jose Mercury News. Ken Doctor, Jeff Sonderman, and Mathew Ingram all wrote about what makes it worth watching. — The Economist continued running pieces all week in its series on the future of the news industry. You can check out several writers'reasons for optimism or read the opening statements in an ongoing debate between NYU's Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr about whether the Internet has been good for journalism. — Boston Globe developer Andy Boyle made his pitch for young journalists to go into web development, or as he put it, "learn to make the internets." — Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together two great social media how-to's for journalists: One on verifying information on social media, and the other on strategies for engagement on Facebook. — Finally, NYU's Clay Shirky gave us another thoughtful essay on the unbundling of news and why the news ecosystem needs to be chaotic right now. In the end, though, here's what he believes news should be: "News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market"; "news has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now"; and "news has to be free, because it has to spread."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:30:10 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=841

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 8, 2011.] Google's biggest social effort yet: This is a two-week edition of This Week in Review, so most of our news comes from last week, rather than this week. The biggest of those stories was the launch of Google+, Google's latest and most substantial foray into the social media landscape. TechCrunch had one of the first and best explanations of what Google+ is all about, and Wired's Steven Levy wrote the most comprehensive account of the thinking at Google behind Plus: It's the product of a fundamental philosophical shift from the web as information to the web as people. Of course, the force to be reckoned with in any big social media venture is Facebook, and even though Google told Search Engine Land it's not made to be a Facebook competitor, Google+ was seen by many (including the New York Times) as Google's most ambitious attempt yet to take on Facebook. The design looks a lot like Facebook, and pages for businesses (like Facebook's Fan Pages) are on their way. Longtime tech blogger Dave Winer was unimpressed at the effort to challenge Facebook, and Om Malik of GigaOM said Facebook has nothing to be afraid of in Google+, though All Facebook's Nick O'Neill said Google+'s ubiquity across the web should present a threat to Facebook. But the biggest contrast people drew between Google+ and Facebook was the more intuitive privacy controls built into its Circles feature. Ex-Salon editor Scott Rosenberg wrote a particularly thoughtful post arguing that Google+ more accurately reflects social life than Facebook: "In truth, Facebook started out with an oversimplified conception of social life, modeled on the artificial hothouse community of a college campus, and it has never succeeded in providing a usable or convenient method for dividing or organizing your life into its different contexts." His thought was echoed by j-prof Jeremy Littau (in two posts) and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor. Google's other ventures into social media — Buzz, Wave, Orkut — have fallen flat, so it's somewhat surprising to see that the initial reviews for Google+ were generally positive. Among those enamored with it were TechCrunch's MG Siegler, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, social media guru Robert Scoble, and the Huffington Post's Craig Kanalley (though he wondered about Google's timing). It quickly began sending TechCrunch loads of traffic, and social media marketer Chris Brogan brainstormed 50 ways Google+ could influence the rest of the web. At the same time, there was some skepticism about its Circles function: TechCrunch's Siegler wondered whether people would use it as intended, and ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez said they might not be equipped to handle complicated, changing relationships. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, said Circles look great, but they aren't going to be much use until there's a critical mass of people to put in them. — Google+ and the news: This being a journalism blog, we're most interested in Google+ for what it means for news. As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman pointed out, the aspect of Google+ that seems to have the most potential is its Sparks feature, which allows users to collect recommended news around a specific term or phrase. Former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee said Sparks could fill a valuable niche for news organizations in between Facebook and Twitter — sort of a more customizable, less awkward RSS. The University of Missouri’s KOMU-TV has already used it in a live broadcast, and Breaking News’ Cory Bergman gave a few valuable lessons from that organization’s first week on Google+. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis gave his thoughts on a few potential uses for news: It could be very useful for collaboration and promotion, but not so much for live coverage. Journalism.co.uk's Sarah Marshall listed several of the same uses, plus interviewing and "as a Facebook for your tweeps." Sonderman suggested a few changes to Google+ to make it even more news-friendly, including allowing news org pages and improving the Sparks search and filtering. Still, he saw it as a valuable addition to the online news consumption landscape: "It’s a serendipity engine, and if executed well it could make Google+ an addictive source of news discovery." A bit of Google+-related miscellany before we move on: Social media marketer Christopher Penn gave some tips on measuring Google+, author Neil Strauss condemned the growing culture of Facebook "Likes" (and now Google +1s), and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram offered a rebuttal. — Murdoch kills News of the World: In one of the most surprising media-related moves of the year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. suddenly shut down one of its most prominent properties, the 168-year-old British tabloid News of the World, on Thursday. The decision stemmed from a long-running scandal involving NotW investigators who illegally hacked into the phones of celebrities. This week, the Guardian reported that the hacking extended to the voicemail of a murdered 13-year-old girl and possibly the families of dead soldiers, and that the paper's editor, Rebekah Brooks (now the head of News Corp. in Britain) was informed of some of the hacking. Facing an advertising boycott and Parliamentary opposition, Murdoch's son, James, announced News of the World will close this weekend. (The Guardian has the definitive blow-by-blow of Thursday's events.) It was a desperate move, and as the New York Times, paidContent, and many on Twitter noted, it was almost certainly an attempt to keep the scandal's collateral damage away from Murdoch's proposed BSkyB merger, which was put on hold and possible in jeopardy this week. Though the closing left hundreds of suddenly out-of-work employees, it may prove less damaging in the big picture for News Corp. than you might expect. NotW only published on Sundays, and it's widely suspected that its sister tabloid, the Sun, will simply expand to include a Sunday edition to cover for its absence. As one Guardian editor stated, the move may simply allow News Corp. to streamline its operation and save cash, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds called it a smart business move. (Its stock actually went up after the announcement.) There's plenty that has yet to play out: The Guardian pointed out how evasive James Murdoch's closing letter was, and Brooks, the one that many thought would take the fall for the scandal, is still around. And the investigation is ongoing, with more arrests being made today. According to the New Yorker's Ken Auletta and CUNY's Jeff Jarvis, though, the buck stops with Rupert himself and the culture he created. — Making journalism easier on Twitter: Twitter has been reaching out to journalists for quite some time now through a media blog, but last week it took things a step further and launched Twitter for Newsrooms, a journalist's guide to using Twitter, with tips on reporting, making conversation, and promoting content. The Lab's Justin Ellis gave a quick glimpse into the rationale behind the project. A few people were skeptical: TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis suspected that Twitter's preaching to the choir, arguing that for the journalists who come across Twitter for Newsrooms, Twitter already is a newsroom. The Journal Register's Steve Buttry called it "more promotional than helpful," and suggested some other Twitter primers for journalists. Ad Age's Matthew Creamer added a tongue-in-cheek guide to releasing your anger on Twitter. Meanwhile, the Lab's Megan Garber reported on the ideas of NPR and Andy Carvin for improving Twitter's functionality for reporting, including a kind of real-time influence and credibility score for Twitter sources, and a journalism-oriented meme-tracking tool for developing stories. — Mobile media and tablet users, profiled: There were several studies released in the past two weeks that are worth noting, starting with Pew's report on e-reader and tablet users. Pew found that e-reader ownership is booming, having doubled in six months. The Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran reasoned that e-readers are ahead of tablets right now primarily because they're so much cheaper, and offered ideas for news organizations to take advantage of the explosion of e-reader users. Three other studies related to tablets and mobile media: One study found that a third of tablet users said it's leading them to read print newspapers and magazines less often; another showed that people are reading more on digital media than we think, and mostly in browsers; and a third gave us more evidence that games are still king among mobile apps. — Reading roundup: Bunches of good stuff to look through from the past two weeks. I'll go through it quickly: — Turns out the "digital first" move announced last month by the Guardian also includes the closing of the international editions of the Guardian and Observer. Jeff Jarvis explained what digital first means, but Suw Charman-Anderson questioned the wisdom the Guardian's strategy. The Lab's Ken Doctor analyzed the economics of the Guardian's situation, as well as the Mail and the BBC's. — This week in AOL/Huffington Post news: Business Insider revealed some leaked lackluster traffic numbers for Patch sites, and reported that Patch is undergoing a HuffPo-ization. That prompted Judy Sims and Slate's Jack Shafer to be the latest to rip into Patch's business model, and Shafer followed up to address rebuttals about non-Patch hyperlocal news. — Google+ was the only interesting Google-related news over the past two weeks: The Lab's Megan Garber wrote about Google's bid to transform mobile ads, potential new directions for Google News, and Google highlighting individual authors in search returns. The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan also wrote on Google's ongoing war on "nonsense" content. — A couple of paywall notes: The Times of London reported that it has 100,000 subscribers a year after its paywall went up, and Dorian Benkoil said the New York Times' plan is working well, the Lab's Megan Garber wrote about the Times adding a "share your access" offer to print subscribers. — Three practical posts for journalists: Poynter's Jeff Sonderman has tips for successful news aggregation and personalized news delivery, and British j-prof Paul Bradshaw reported on his experience running his blog through a Facebook Page for a month. — And three bigger-picture pieces to think on: Wetpaint's Ben Elowitz on the shrinking of the non-Facebook web, former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell on the U.S.' place within the global media ecosystem, and the Economist on the role of news organizations in a citizen-driven media world.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:23:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=838

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

This Week in Review: WikiLeaks’ new rivals, Ongo’s aggregation play, and Demand Media makes a splash

Buy Minocycline Without Prescription

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 24, 2011.] The New York Post's iPad block: News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch has developed a reputation for draconian policies toward paid content and the web, and he furthered that pattern this week when News Corp.'s New York Post blocked access to its website from the iPad's Safari browser in an effort to sell more of its iPad apps. A subscription to the app runs .99 per month; access to the website would be free. The reaction on the web was overwhelmingly negative: Tech pioneer Dave Winer accused the Post of "breaking the web," paidContent's Staci Kramer called it "one of the most poorly conceived paywall efforts I’ve come across," and business journalist Adam Tinworth called the move "dictatorial." As Kramer and Examiner.com's Michael Santo noted, the Post left plenty of workarounds for users who don't want to pay up, through alternative browsers like Skyfire. Kramer and Engadget's Dana Wollman also suspected that Murdoch is attempting to recreate the Post as an app-based tabloid like his other major effort, The Daily. (Both are skeptical about the prospects of that plan.) News Corp. does have some good news on the iPad front this week, though: The Post and The Daily are the two highest-grossing publishing apps on the iPad, ranking well ahead of the next-most-lucrative apps — two comic-book apps and Conde Nast's New Yorker and Wired. Poynter's Regina McCombs talked to three other iPad app publishers — CNN, the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record, and Better Homes & Gardens — about how they put their apps together. And the Columbia Journalism Review's Zachary Sniderman compared the iPad's adoption process to that of print periodicals before it: The iPad's sales, he said, "mirror a long trend of historical adoption rates and cultural attitudes: initial enthusiasm for a new platform, slow adoption, and then gradually increasing sales as the population gets habituated to using the new technology." — A fresh round of news innovation: This week was a big one in news innovation, as the Knight Foundation (one of the Lab's funders) announced the 16 winners of the last round of its five-year Knight News Challenge competition. The Lab's Joshua Benton gave a good annotated roundup of the winning entries, which will get a total of .7 million: There are a few names many people will recognize, including former New York Times/ProPublica project DocumentCloud, the AP's (and the Lab's) Jonathan Stray, and the crisis text-mapping service Ushahidi. I would expect profiles of several of the winning projects over the next week or so, and the Lab's Justin Ellis provided the first with a look at the Chicago Tribune's PANDA, which aims to help newsrooms analyze data more easily. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noticed the data journalism theme running through the winning entries, and elsewhere, the Daily Dot's Nicholas White opined on the importance of data in journalism. Benton's post also included a glance at what's next for the News Challenge, as well as highlights of what has and hasn't gone well over the News Challenge's short history from a recently released internal review. Some of the main challenges: Underestimated difficulty of citizen journalism and news game projects, problems with accurate cost budgeting, and a slow timetable. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman also looked back at some of the lessons learned from the News Challenge. The Knight Foundation also announced a three-year, .76 million investment in MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, which named Berkman Center researcher Ethan Zuckerman its new director. The Lab's Andrew Phelps talked to Zuckerman about where the center is headed, and Zuckerman looked at his goals in a post of his own. Mathew Ingramwondered whether the center can help with the ongoing reinvention of local journalism. — Two legal wins for aggregators: Rulings were handed down this week in two cases that probably only media-law nerds have following, but both have big implications for online news aggregation and link journalism. In the first case, a federal court ruled that a financial site can publish analysts' stock tips immediately, a blow to a legal principle called the "hot news doctrine" that protects certain facts ("hot news") from being republished for a short period of time. (Here's a great explainer of the case from last year.) This was one of those rulings where everyone declares victory: The court actually upheld the validity of the hot news doctrine in the Internet/aggregation era, but said it didn't apply in this case — the analysts are newsmakers and the website is the news breaker, the judge wrote. As Dealbook noted, the lawyer for Google and Twitter (who filed anti-hot news doctrine briefs) called it "a great decision for the free flow of information in the new media age," while the pro-hot news AP called it "a victory for the news media and the public." But as paidContent's Joe Mullin argued, it looks as though this decision will ultimate weaken the hot news doctrine. In the other case, the copyright enforcement firm Righthaven had its lawsuit on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal dismissed. Righthaven had sued a message-board user for reposting a 19-paragraph Review-Journal editorial, but the judge ruled that the posting was protected under fair use because the editorial only contained five paragraphs of purely original opinions and because it was posted for noncommercial reasons. — A renewed debate over anonymity: There have been a handful of streams of discussion regarding anonymity online over the past few weeks that converged a bit this week, and I thought it might be helpful to summarize a couple of them briefly for you. Two weeks ago, a supposed lesbian blogger in Syria was unmasked as a middle-aged American grad student, prompting thoughtful responses from people like the Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman and on the role of participatory media and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and the Berkman Center's Jillian York on the continued need for anonymity. And last week, a couple photographed kissing in the streets amid riots in Vancouver was identified online and making the mainstream-media rounds within days, prompting questions about the end of anonymity by writers like the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Salon's Drew Grant. Meanwhile, former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard decried anonymous online commenting, calling it "faux democracy" and urging news organizations to require commenters to use their real names. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram drew on several of those developments to echo Gillmor's and York's defenses of anonymity, arguing that it's been a key part of healthy democracy, allowing people to speak to the powerful without fear of reprisal. (The AP's Jonathan Stray called it "the digital analog of right to free assembly.") "We shouldn’t toss that kind of principle aside so lightly just because we want to cut down on irritating comments from readers, or stop the occasional blogger from pretending to be someone they are not," Ingram wrote. — Reading roundup: Here's what else happened at the intersection of journalism and technology this week: — Outgoing New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who's done a fair amount of Twitter-tweaking over the past month or so, gave an interview to Reuters in which he said the idea that he's opposed to social media is a misconception. But sociologist Zeynep Tufekci took issue with his idea that social media use leads to less time with "real-life" friends, and when Keller asked for evidence, she let him have it. The Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran also defended social media's usefulness to journalists with some new Pew data. — This Week in AOL: Two more former employees gave their own horror stories about working there — one a writer, the other from sales. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong also said he's considering paid content as part of the company's continued revamp, the Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum pondered the AOL Way and the journalistic "hamster wheel," and Poynter's Steve Myers said comparisons between the Huffington Post and the New York Times are unfounded. — Another potential player in the ongoing long-form nonfiction renaissance, Byliner, launched this week. The Lab and Poynter ran previews. — Finally, the interesting pieces on the FCC's recent report on the future of local news continue to trickle out. Here's a pointed analysis by the folks at Free Press and a two-part Columbia Journalism Review interview with the report's lead writer, Steven Waldman.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:05:59 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=815

Buy Adipex Without Prescription

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 27, 2011.] Censorship, the law, and Twitter: If we hadn't already learned how social media are opening the traditional media's gatekeeping role to the masses, we got a pretty good object lesson this week in Britain. Here's what happened: To keep the British tabloids from digging into an alleged affair with a reality TV star, Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs took out a British court provision called a super-injunction that prohibits media from identifying him and reporting on both the story and the very fact that a super-injunction exists. But the super-injunction was no match for Facebook, Twitter, and soccer forums, where thousands of people talked about Giggs and the affair in spite of (and because of) the order. Since then, a Scottish newspaper and a member of Parliament have both named Giggs, rendering the super-injunction essentially ineffective and causing quite a bit of handwringing over whether gag orders are a lost cause in the Twitter age, and whether or not that's a good thing. Giggs sued Twitter for the breach, and some members of Parliament started looking for ways to control the site. Prime Minister David Cameron said Twitter made Britain's injunctions "unfair" and "unsustainable" for traditional media and urged Parliament to change them. Some people, including World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and the Guardian's Richard Hillgrove, said the problem lies with Twitter, not the law, with Hillgrove (rather absurdly) suggesting a delay mechanism to monitor posts before they go up: "Twitter and Facebook are not blank sheets of paper. They are media publishers like any other." Others faulted the law instead: At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said it allows the wealthy to play by different rules, and the Telegraph'sHarry Mount said that thanks to the web, "a form of people power has been effectively absorbed into that new body of privacy law." The Vancouver Sun's Mario Canseco documented the failure of gag orders in the Internet age in Canada, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM advised courts and governments to quit trying to enforce antiquated laws, saying they "may not like the implications of a totally distributed real-time information network, but they are going to have to start living with it sooner rather than later." Then, of course, there's the question of whether the anonymous online super-injunction violators have any legal repercussions to worry about. As the New York Times noted, Twitter has been resistant to turning over its users' identities in the past, though a Twitter official said this week it will hand over user info to the authorities if it's legally required to. But even with Twitter's compliance, there would still be hurdles to clear in identifying users, the Telegraph explained. — iPad channels for big and small media: Several big-media publications neared or hit iPad milestones this week: On stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, The Daily's Greg Clayman said it's nearing a million downloads since it was launched in January. Clayman wouldn't say how many paid subscribers the News Corp. iPad-only publication has (a far more interesting figure in determining The Daily's viability), but Adweek's Lucia Moses said The Daily will announce its number of paid downloads — it only started charging in March — once it hits a "target level." Meanwhile, Wired and GQ were made available for in-app subscriptions through Apple App Store this week, after their owner, Condé Nast, became one of the first major publishers to strike a deal with Apple for in-app subscriptions earlier this month. Another major publication, Playboy, launched an iPad subscription outside the App Store, because it obviously has some difficulty complying with Apple's "no nudity" policy. Playboy's app is essentially an iPad-optimized website, which might seem like a tempting option for publishers who don't want to deal with Apple's restrictions, but as Mashable and GigaOM explained, Playboy might be uniquely positioned to pull this off where others can't. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram looked at those cases and weighed the pluses and minuses for publishers of getting into bed with Apple. Of course, big publishers aren't the only ones getting into the iPad game: At paidContent, Ashley Norris, CEO of a small publishing company that just released an iPad app, argued that indie publishers could play a key role in developing the tablet magazine. Flipboard is a pretty ideal model for those publishers: It's valued at 0 million, and SiliconAngle's Tom Foremski said it exemplifies the current en vogue tech-bubble business plan: "find free content and organize it into a useful interface." That niche might not play as big of a part in the iPad market as we think, though: As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted via ReadWriteWeb, news apps make up only 3% of all the apps in the App Store. — Driving more traffic from Facebook: Facebook has been working hard lately to cozy up to news organizations, and this week it provided some statistics that may have some of those organizations looking more closely at integrating Facebook into their sites. According to stats Search Engine Land got from Facebook (so grain of salt, etc.), the average media site integrated with Facebook has gotten a 300% jump in Facebook referral traffic, and ABC News, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post have all reportedly doubled their traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins. Meanwhile, Fortune's Peter Lauria talked to Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik about the possibility of news orgs charging on Facebook using Facebook credits, like some Facebook games do now. As it's been known to do, Facebook played a big role in the aftermath of another natural disaster this week when a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. The local newspaper, the Joplin Globe, told Poynter about how they set up a Facebook page to help people find family and friends in the tornado's wake. Elsewhere in social media and news, the New York Times experimented this week with a human-powered Twitter feed, as opposed to its usual mostly automatically driven style. The Times' Liz Heron (and a couple of other newspaper social media editors) talked to Poynter's Jeff Sonderman about their Twitter strategies, and Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words looked at how the experiment changed the Times' Twitter feed. Heron also revealed the Times' informal social media guidelines at the BBC's Social Media Summit: "Use common sense and don't be stupid." — Reading roundup: Not a lot of big future-of-news stories this week, a several smaller things worth keeping an eye on: — Google notified publishers late last week that it's abandoning its project to scan and archive hundreds of years of old newspapers. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes lamented the decision, and Paul Balcerak urged newspapers to pick up where Google left off. — This week's AOL/Huffington Post bits and pieces: Huffington Post Canada has been launched, AOL's Daily Finance has been made over, and some HuffPo staff are reportedly leaving because they're upset with how the AOL/HuffPo marriage has gone so far. Meanwhile, even though AOL's content is free, CEO Tim Armstrong expressed his general belief in paid content online. — Ben Huh of the Cheezburger network of comedy sites announced he's working on what he's calling the Moby Dick Project — an effort to reform the way news is presented and consumed online. ReadWriteWeb gave more details of the type of software he's developing. — A couple of addenda to last week's linking discussion: Former Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry wrote about solving the workflow issue at newspapers, and at the Guardian, Dan Gillmor called out lazy linking — linking to a summary, rather than the original piece — in online aggregation. — CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis made a case for news as conversation and the value of comments, and at 10,000 Words, Alex Schmidt wrote about the way poisonous online comments can affect reporters. — Finally, Canadian media consultant Ken Goldstein issued a paper looking at decline circulation of newspapers in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. He included a possibly remarkably prescient 1964 quotation by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:01:39 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=813

Buy Adalat Without Prescription

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

Buy Casodex Without Prescription

]]> [This week's review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 20, 2011.] Twitter on the brain: Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller got a rise out of a lot of folks online with one of the shortest of his 21 career tweets: "#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss." Keller revealed the purpose of his social experiment this week in a column arguing, in so many words, that Twitter may be dulling your humanity, and probably making you stupid, too. Here's the money quote: "my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity." This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well online. There were a couple strains of reaction: Business Insider's Henry Blodget and All Twitter's Lauren Dugan argued that Twitter may indeed be changing us, but for the good, by helping make previously impossible connections. Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick of Techdirt countered Keller by saying that while Twitter isn't built for deep conversations, it is quite good at providing an entry point for such discussion: "What you see publicly posted on Twitter and Facebook is just the tip of the conversation iceberg," Tsotsis said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, defended Twitter's true social nature, and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci gave a fantastic breakdown of what Twitter does and doesn't do culturally and socially. Two of the most eloquent responses were provided by Nick Bilton, one of Keller's own employees, and by Gizmodo's Mat Honan. Bilton pointed out that our brains have shown a remarkable ability to adapt quickly to new technologies without sacrificing old capacities. (Be sure to check out Keller's response afterward.) Honan made a similar argument: Keller, he said, is confusing the medium with the message, and Twitter, like any technology, is what you make it. "If you choose to do superficial things there, you will have superficial experiences. If you use it to communicate with others on a deeper level, you can have more meaningful experiences that make you smarter, build lasting relationships, and generally enhance your life," Honan wrote. — Google gets more local with news: Google News unveiled a few interesting changes in the past week, starting with the launch of "News near you." Google has sorted news by location for a while now, but this feature will allow smartphone users to automatically get local news wherever they are. ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski explained why newspapers should be worried about Google moving further onto their local-news turf, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram criticized newspapers for not coming up with like this themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, on the other hand, said Google's feature is still in need of some human curation to go with its algorithmic aggregation. That's an area in which local newspapers can still dominate, he said, but it'll require some technological catchup, as well as a willingness to get over fears about linking to competitors. Another change, not publicized by Google News but spotted by the folks at Search Engine Land, was the addition of an option to allow users to filter out blogs and press releases from their results. This raised the question, what exactly does Google consider a blog? Google told Search Engine Land it relies on a variety of factors to make that decision, especially self-identification. Mathew Ingram ripped this classification, and urged Google to put everything that contains news together in Google News and let readers sort it out. — Fitting linking into news' workflow: A discussion about linking has been simmering on Twitter on and off over the past few weeks, and it began to come together into something useful this week. This round of the conversation started with a post by web thinker and scholar Doc Searls, who wondered why news organizations don't link out more often. In the comments, the Chicago Tribune's Brian Boyer suggested that one reason is that many newspapers' CMS's and workflows are print-centric, making linking logistically difficult. CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson responded that the workflow issue isn't much of an excuse, saying, as he put it on Twitter: "At this point 'linking' has been around for twenty years. The fact that this is STILL a workflow issue is almost worse than not caring." This kicked off a sprawling debate on Twitter, aptly chronicled via Storify by Mathew Ingram and Alex Byers. Ingram also wrote a post responding to a few of the themes of resistance of links, particularly the notion that information on the web is inferior to information gained by old-fashioned reporting. British journalist Kevin Anderson took on the workflow issue in particular, noting how outdated many newspaper CMS's are and challenging them to catch up technologically: "It’s an industrial workflow operating in a digital age. It’s really only down to ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ thinking that allows such a patently inefficient process to persist." — AOL's continued makeover: Another week, another slew of personnel moves at AOL. PaidContent's David Kaplan reported that AOL is hiring "a bunch" of new (paid) editors and shuffling some current employees around after its layoff of hundreds this spring. Overall, Kaplan wrote, this is part of the continued effort to put the Huffington Post's stamp on AOL's editorial products. One of the AOL entities most affected by the shifts is Seed, which had been a freelance network, but will now fall under AOL's advertising area as a business-to-business product. Saul Hansell, who was hired in 2009 to run Seed, is moving to HuffPo to edit its new "Big News" features. In a blog post, Hansell talked about what this means for HuffPo and for Seed. Meanwhile, the company is also rolling out AOL Industry, a set of B2B sites covering energy, defense, and government. But wait, that's not all: AOL's Patch is launching 33 new sites in states targeting the 2012 election. The hyperlocal news site Street Fight also reported that Patch is urging its editors to post more often, and a group of independent local news sites is banding together to tell the world that they are not Patch, nor anything like it. — Reading roundup: As always, plenty of other stuff get to this week. — We mentioned a Pew report's reference to the Drudge Report's influence in last week's review, and this week the New York Times' David Carr marveled at Drudge's continued success without many new-media bells and whistles. Poynter's Julie Moos looked at Drudge's traffic over the years, while the Washington Post disputed Pew's numbers. ZDNet's David Gewirtz had five lessons Drudge can teach the rest of the media world. — A few paid-content items: A Nielsen survey on what people are willing to pay for various mobile services, Poynter's Rick Edmonds on the New York Times' events marketing for its pay plan, and the Lab's Justin Ellis on paid-content lessons from small newspapers. — A couple of tablet-related items: Next Issue Media, a joint effort of five publishers to sell magazines on tablets, released its first set of magazines on Google Android-powered Samsung Galaxy. And here at the Lab, Ken Doctor expounded on the iPad as the "missing link" in news' digital evolution. — Columbia University announced it will launch a local news site this summer focusing on accountability journalism, and the Lab's Megan Garber gave some more details about what Columbia's doing with it. — The Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Kirchner had an interesting conversation with Slate's David Plotz about Slate's aggregation efforts, and in response, Reuters' Felix Salmon made the case for valuing aggregation skills in journalists. — This weekend's think piece is a musing by Maria Bustillos at The Awl on Wikipedia, Marshall McLuhan, communal knowledge-making, and the fate of the expert. Enjoy.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:20:17 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=920

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 18, 2011.] A fight for online freedom: A U.S. House committee hearing brought an important three-week old bill on Internet censorship to the spotlight this week. The Stop Online Piracy Act (a companion of the Senate's Protect IP Act), would allow content creators to shut down websites on which people hosted unauthorized copyrighted content, or linked to sites that did. The Atlantic has a good, quick explainer, and the advocacy group Fight for the Future has a sharp video illustrating its implications. If you want to go in-depth, Techdirt has the most thorough continuing coverage of the bill. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that it seems as though pretty much everyone on the Internet hates this bill. Bunches of Internet giants oppose it — Google was a major testifier at this week's hearing (though its rep referenced the WikiLeaks payment blocks favorably, which concerned some) — Tumblr ran an online campaign against the bill by mock-censoring its users' dashboard screens, and loads of online commentators howled against it. Here's why they're so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow for free speech on the web. The New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: "The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can't control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken." As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, you can't have the explosion of creative production, individual empowerment, and democratic potential of the Internet without the downsides of rampant copyright infringement. If you take away the latter, he argued, you take away the former, too. And venture capitalist Brad Burnham made the interesting point that the architecture of the web is based on the assumption that there are more good actors out there than bad, an idea that this bill runs squarely against. This bill poses some potential problems for journalism, too. Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words outlined some of those issues, pointing out that articles could be censored for linking to sites with piracy information, and that citizen journalism and innovation could be stifled. — Twitter as one-way street: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report this week on the way news organizations use Twitter, and the results weren't pretty: News orgs, they found, were using Twitter predominantly as a way to simply broadcast their stories online, not taking much advantage of Twitter's interactive capabilities or its ability to link readers to a wide variety of sources. PEJ said the behavior was reminiscent of the link-phobic early days of the web, and the Lab's Megan Garber called it a "glorified RSS feed." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was particularly troubled by how little news orgs and their journalists asked readers for news tips and feedback, and media consultant Terry Heaton said this Twitter-as-headline-feed pattern among news orgs is evidence that it really is all about the money. "If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web," he wrote. "When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else." Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, tied the study to another Pew study that reinforced the value of personal recommendations over impersonal ones. There was also quite a bit of talk on Twitter about the study's weaknesses, led largely by media scholars like USC's Robert Hernandez. Still, one j-prof, Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, pointed out that this report's findings do echo those of several previous studies, both academic and professional. — Occupy Wall Street and scooping the wire: New York police swooped in earlier this week to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which in itself wasn't surprising: Similar sweeps have been done in numerous American cities. What drew particular attention among future-of-news folks was the way they did it — by blocking journalists from viewing the action and even arresting 26 of them across the country, of whom seven worked full-time for traditional news orgs and seven had NYPD press credentials. The New York Times and the Atlantic have the most thorough accounts of what went on, and you can check out video of one of the reporter arrests at the Times' The Local. One interesting side story to emerge from those arrests began when AP staff members tweeted that their AP colleagues had been arrested before the news hit the wire. The AP sent out a stern memo admonishing its journalists to beat their own wire reports on Twitter, prompting the New York Times' Brian Stelter to ask, "Shouldn't the wire speed up?!" GigaOM's Mathew said news orgs should consider Twitter the newswire now, and Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that policies like the AP's (and Reuters') are the products of head-in-the-sand thinking. (The AP sent out another memo the next day explaining that its initial memo was more about the safety of its arrested reporters than anything.) Elsewhere in Occupy-related media and tech ideas: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal kicked off a series of posts on technology's role in the Occupy protests with a creative description of Occupy as a type of API, ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell praised Storify for its role in Occupy coverage, and New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard explained why she's ditching the objectivity-based paradigm of the mainstream media to get involved with Occupy. — Romenesko and online attribution: A few of the loose ends from Jim Romenesko's unceremonious departure from the Poynter Institute were tied up since last week's review: Poynter renamed Romenesko's blog MediaWire, and in an interview, Romenesko shed some light on his insistence on resigning: "I worked there for 12 years, and I'm supposed to spend my final days being supervised, having a babysitter, whatever? It just seemed a little bit humiliating." Most notably, the Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry published the article resulting from the reporting that started this bizarre episode. In it, she argued that the attribution problems aren't limited to Romenesko, but are in part of a function of Poynter's move to longer — and, as she put it — "over-aggregated" posts. Several Poynter faculty members also weighed in, with Roy Peter Clark providing the sharpest take: "The standards of attribution we still apply in print may in fact be outdated in the age of sampling, file sharing, and mash-ups." Other media critics continued to defend Romenesko (Reuters' Jack Shafer) and rip Poynter (Terry Heaton, Felix Salmon). The Gender Report's Jasmine Linabary, meanwhile, wondered why we weren't seeing much attention paid to women commenting on the Romenesko story. — Amazon releases the Kindle Fire: Amazon released its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week, and the reviews were mixed. (PaidContent has a quick roundup of some of the big reviewers.) It got panned by a few places (most notably Wired), but the general sentiment was that while the Fire can't match up the iPad and some of the other top-end tablets, it's still a decent deal at $200. As the New York Times' David Pogue put it: "The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish." A few other notes regarding the Fire: Time Inc. had five of its magazines on the Fire at its launch after some protracted negotiating, and Amazon has made the Fire's source code available to developers to encourage software experimentation. Wired's Steven Levy, meanwhile, had an in-depth discussion with Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the state of the company. — Reading roundup: Bunches and bunches of interesting little stories this week. Here are a few we haven't hit yet: — A federal judge ruled late last week that Twitter has to hand over information about possible WikiLeaks supporters, one of whom, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, expressed her outrage in the Guardian over the decision's threat to civil rights. ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram were also among those concerned about the future of privacy online. — A few advertising-related tidbits: Reuters' Felix Salmon summarized a fascinating talk he gave on the woeful state of online advertising and what to do about it, Wired looked at Twitter's efforts to make serendipity pay as an advertising model, and the Lab examined newspapers' advertising efforts on Twitter. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an innovative cross-platform interactive ad that also mimicked its news content, which led ACES' Charles Apple and the Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler to question its ethics. The Times told Hendler the ad couldn't realistically be confused with actual Times content. — The Columbia Journalism Review explored a crucial issue in the changing news ecosystem — what happens to all the communities that aren't hubs for innovation? — with a series of pieces on Modesto, California. — Also in CJR, Megan Garber wrote a fascinating article looking back at how journalism has viewed its future over the years. The University of Colorado's Steve Outing decided to add to that tradition of journalistic fortune-telling with his set of predictions about what online news will look like 20 years from now.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com 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-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:20:17 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=920

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 18, 2011.] A fight for online freedom: A U.S. House committee hearing brought an important three-week old bill on Internet censorship to the spotlight this week. The Stop Online Piracy Act (a companion of the Senate's Protect IP Act), would allow content creators to shut down websites on which people hosted unauthorized copyrighted content, or linked to sites that did. The Atlantic has a good, quick explainer, and the advocacy group Fight for the Future has a sharp video illustrating its implications. If you want to go in-depth, Techdirt has the most thorough continuing coverage of the bill. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that it seems as though pretty much everyone on the Internet hates this bill. Bunches of Internet giants oppose it — Google was a major testifier at this week's hearing (though its rep referenced the WikiLeaks payment blocks favorably, which concerned some) — Tumblr ran an online campaign against the bill by mock-censoring its users' dashboard screens, and loads of online commentators howled against it. Here's why they're so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow for free speech on the web. The New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: "The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can't control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken." As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, you can't have the explosion of creative production, individual empowerment, and democratic potential of the Internet without the downsides of rampant copyright infringement. If you take away the latter, he argued, you take away the former, too. And venture capitalist Brad Burnham made the interesting point that the architecture of the web is based on the assumption that there are more good actors out there than bad, an idea that this bill runs squarely against. This bill poses some potential problems for journalism, too. Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words outlined some of those issues, pointing out that articles could be censored for linking to sites with piracy information, and that citizen journalism and innovation could be stifled. — Twitter as one-way street: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report this week on the way news organizations use Twitter, and the results weren't pretty: News orgs, they found, were using Twitter predominantly as a way to simply broadcast their stories online, not taking much advantage of Twitter's interactive capabilities or its ability to link readers to a wide variety of sources. PEJ said the behavior was reminiscent of the link-phobic early days of the web, and the Lab's Megan Garber called it a "glorified RSS feed." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was particularly troubled by how little news orgs and their journalists asked readers for news tips and feedback, and media consultant Terry Heaton said this Twitter-as-headline-feed pattern among news orgs is evidence that it really is all about the money. "If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web," he wrote. "When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else." Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, tied the study to another Pew study that reinforced the value of personal recommendations over impersonal ones. There was also quite a bit of talk on Twitter about the study's weaknesses, led largely by media scholars like USC's Robert Hernandez. Still, one j-prof, Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, pointed out that this report's findings do echo those of several previous studies, both academic and professional. — Occupy Wall Street and scooping the wire: New York police swooped in earlier this week to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which in itself wasn't surprising: Similar sweeps have been done in numerous American cities. What drew particular attention among future-of-news folks was the way they did it — by blocking journalists from viewing the action and even arresting 26 of them across the country, of whom seven worked full-time for traditional news orgs and seven had NYPD press credentials. The New York Times and the Atlantic have the most thorough accounts of what went on, and you can check out video of one of the reporter arrests at the Times' The Local. One interesting side story to emerge from those arrests began when AP staff members tweeted that their AP colleagues had been arrested before the news hit the wire. The AP sent out a stern memo admonishing its journalists to beat their own wire reports on Twitter, prompting the New York Times' Brian Stelter to ask, "Shouldn't the wire speed up?!" GigaOM's Mathew said news orgs should consider Twitter the newswire now, and Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that policies like the AP's (and Reuters') are the products of head-in-the-sand thinking. (The AP sent out another memo the next day explaining that its initial memo was more about the safety of its arrested reporters than anything.) Elsewhere in Occupy-related media and tech ideas: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal kicked off a series of posts on technology's role in the Occupy protests with a creative description of Occupy as a type of API, ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell praised Storify for its role in Occupy coverage, and New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard explained why she's ditching the objectivity-based paradigm of the mainstream media to get involved with Occupy. — Romenesko and online attribution: A few of the loose ends from Jim Romenesko's unceremonious departure from the Poynter Institute were tied up since last week's review: Poynter renamed Romenesko's blog MediaWire, and in an interview, Romenesko shed some light on his insistence on resigning: "I worked there for 12 years, and I'm supposed to spend my final days being supervised, having a babysitter, whatever? It just seemed a little bit humiliating." Most notably, the Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry published the article resulting from the reporting that started this bizarre episode. In it, she argued that the attribution problems aren't limited to Romenesko, but are in part of a function of Poynter's move to longer — and, as she put it — "over-aggregated" posts. Several Poynter faculty members also weighed in, with Roy Peter Clark providing the sharpest take: "The standards of attribution we still apply in print may in fact be outdated in the age of sampling, file sharing, and mash-ups." Other media critics continued to defend Romenesko (Reuters' Jack Shafer) and rip Poynter (Terry Heaton, Felix Salmon). The Gender Report's Jasmine Linabary, meanwhile, wondered why we weren't seeing much attention paid to women commenting on the Romenesko story. — Amazon releases the Kindle Fire: Amazon released its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week, and the reviews were mixed. (PaidContent has a quick roundup of some of the big reviewers.) It got panned by a few places (most notably Wired), but the general sentiment was that while the Fire can't match up the iPad and some of the other top-end tablets, it's still a decent deal at 0. As the New York Times' David Pogue put it: "The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish." A few other notes regarding the Fire: Time Inc. had five of its magazines on the Fire at its launch after some protracted negotiating, and Amazon has made the Fire's source code available to developers to encourage software experimentation. Wired's Steven Levy, meanwhile, had an in-depth discussion with Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the state of the company. — Reading roundup: Bunches and bunches of interesting little stories this week. Here are a few we haven't hit yet: — A federal judge ruled late last week that Twitter has to hand over information about possible WikiLeaks supporters, one of whom, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, expressed her outrage in the Guardian over the decision's threat to civil rights. ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram were also among those concerned about the future of privacy online. — A few advertising-related tidbits: Reuters' Felix Salmon summarized a fascinating talk he gave on the woeful state of online advertising and what to do about it, Wired looked at Twitter's efforts to make serendipity pay as an advertising model, and the Lab examined newspapers' advertising efforts on Twitter. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an innovative cross-platform interactive ad that also mimicked its news content, which led ACES' Charles Apple and the Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler to question its ethics. The Times told Hendler the ad couldn't realistically be confused with actual Times content. — The Columbia Journalism Review explored a crucial issue in the changing news ecosystem — what happens to all the communities that aren't hubs for innovation? — with a series of pieces on Modesto, California. — Also in CJR, Megan Garber wrote a fascinating article looking back at how journalism has viewed its future over the years. The University of Colorado's Steve Outing decided to add to that tradition of journalistic fortune-telling with his set of predictions about what online news will look like 20 years from now.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:40 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=905

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

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

Buy Adipex Without Prescription

]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] A heavyweight enters the tablet ring: Amazon became the latest company to jump into the tablet market this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a 9 tablet that will run on Google's Android system. It's a 7" touch-screen tablet that's essentially a knockoff of the BlackBerry Playbook — much smaller and cheaper than Apple's iPad. Amazon also revealed three new Kindle models ranging from to 9, two of them touch-screen, as well as a new Kindle Fire-only web browser, Silk (more on that at the LA Times). The two most comprehensive early looks at the Fire came from Wired's Steven Levy and Bloomberg's Brad Stone. Levy looked more at the device itself, describing it as a way for Amazon to spotlight its non-book media library and saying its biggest challenge is to Netflix. Stone looked more at the corporate strategy behind the Fire, noting that it "funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing." (Sounds like a certain other tablet we know.) By the end of launch day, several tech sites like TechCrunch and ZDNet had already declared the Fire the winner of the hypercompetitive Android tablet market, and Ad Age said it would soon have tablet consumption taking off. The bigger question, then, was whether the Fire would present the first real threat to Apple's iPad. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal summed up the Fire's challenge to the iPad — smaller, cheaper, and the first media experience as thoroughly integrated as Apple's App Store. As the Atlantic's Alesh Houdek put it, the Fire may do most everything tablet owners really want, only for a lot less than the iPad. But ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow said the Fire can't match up to the iPad, and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and paidContent's Tom Krazit both said it's not even directly competing with the iPad — it's in a more utilitarian market, where the iPad is more about luxury. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that to content producers, Amazon and Apple are going to look very similar: They both see their devices as ways to sell their own content, which puts them in competition with the content providers themselves. The Fire also launched with a newsstand, with big magazine publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith among the first to sign deals with Amazon, under similar terms to Apple's 30% cut of revenue. (News Corp. also signed a deal to put Fox TV shows on the Fire.) The New York Observer's Emily Witt noted that the Fire could be the mobile-content Apple competitor publishers have been looking for, and the Lab's Martin Langeveld said the Fire will present a fresh disruption for content providers, furthering the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing and eliminating the need for third-party advertising. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman posed several questions journalists should be asking about the Fire, looking at things like paid content, customer data, and app development. — Objections to 'frictionless sharing': Reactions continued to pour in about Facebook's latest overhaul, announced late last week. Many of those concerns centered around the same theme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's brave new world of ubiquitous, "frictionless" sharing. The New York Times' Somini Sengupta and the LA Times' Jessica Guynn gave us a picture of what this world might look like, and Slate's Farhad Manjoo explained why sharing should still be a choice. Needless to say, this brought up another round of complaints about privacy on Facebook: Tech pioneer Dave Winer said Facebook has crossed the privacy Rubicon by seeking out information about you to post to others, rather than just using information you've chosen to share. Entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook can track every page you visit even when you're logged out. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter argued that this type of involuntary sharing should be a concern for every news organization that works with Facebook, and former New York Times developer Michael Donohoe said the Times refused to implement that kind of sharing via Facebook. There was one (non-Facebook) voice countering that the passive sharing isn't that big of a deal: Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. A couple of deeper thoughts on the issue: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote on Facebook as "the Meaning Machine," and media prof Mark Deuze argued that living our lives inside of a mediated environment (like Facebook encourages to) can actually help us to see ourselves as deeply connected to others, if we're willing to let go of our self-absorption. As I touched on a bit earlier, there's also the question of what news organizations should do with Facebook: Gawker's Ryan Tate explained why many media companies are so eager to be part of Facebook's plans (huge audiences, huge amounts of data), and Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik explained at the Lab and at the Online News Association conference how journalists can take advantage of these changes. But Jeff Sonderman was a bit more skeptical, urging news organizations to weigh the costs as well as the benefits. Finally, these changes probably aren't good news for Google and its own network Google+, as Facebook begins collecting loads of valuable personal data that Google can't touch, Mathew Ingram explained. Twitter does its own thing (real-time news) too well to be too worried, Ingram said, but the New York Times' Nick Bilton wrote that Twitter isn't user-friendly enough to be for everyone, as Facebook is. — Media trust and the new local news: The Pew Research Center released two surveys over the past week or so: The first was the latest in a regular series of looks at the American public's views of the press, and results weren't pretty. The press hit record lows in the public's mind in terms of fairness, accuracy, bias, morality, professionalism, and impact on democracy. (Poynter has a good, quick summary.) Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that many of the poll respondents get most of their news from TV, which he said isn't a particularly substantive media diet. "The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs," he wrote. One other nugget: j-prof Alfred Hermida pointed outthat many social media say they get the same news there as on traditional news. The second study examined the platforms on which people get their local news. There were a few different takeaways from this one: The New York Times focused on the fact that a broad range of platforms have joined TV as predominant local news sources, while the LA Times and Poynter's Rick Edmonds centered on the paradox that many people were very dependent on their local newspaper but still wouldn't care much if it were gone. O'Reilly Radar's Alex Howard had a fine analysis of the study, using it as a jumping-off point for a piece on the Internet as the future of local news. Other notes from the data: Broadcasting & Cable looked at the areas where local TV did well, Poynter's Julie Moos noticed that many people follow local news even when nothing big is going on, and paidContent focused on the role of mobile media in local news consumption. — More over-aggregation accusations: The business news site Business Insider announced some happy news late last week — it had recently raised  million in funding. But that announcement prompted a wave of criticism about the ethics of their aggregation efforts. Reuters' Ryan McCarthy laid out the basic accusation: Business Insider, he said, routinely lifts large chunks of stories from other outlets while only providing scant attribution or links. Others, like former Business Insider employee Ben Popper of BetaBeat, echoed the complaint. So did Instapaper founder Marco Arment, who noted how little traffic he gets from Business Insider republishing his stories. Business Insider's Henry Blodget responded twice to Arment, the second time in a massively long, detailed post essentially blaming the aggregation problems on some weird content management system glitches. Based on that post, Reuters' Felix Salmon said Business Insider still falls on the wrong side of "over-aggregation," drawing a distinction between human-edited and automatically driven aggregation pages. There was some praise for Business Insider in light of their funding, though — CNBC.com and the Guardian both looked at what makes the site work so well. — Reading roundup: Other stuff to keep an eye on this week: — The Wall Street Journal changed its website's privacy policy to connect personally identifiable data with browsing history without user permission. Yeah, people weren't crazy about that, especially since the Journal has been one of the big crusaders in reporting on corporate violations of privacy online. Here's New York magazine's and Dan Gillmor's takes. — Google launched Google News Standout, which allows news organizations to flag their top work. The Lab's Megan Garber examined the way it rewards generosity, and Wired's Tim Carmody looked at the increasing integration between Google News and Google+. — This Week in Patch: Patch's local site editors are reportedly being asked to drum up sales leads, and the Batavian's Howard Owens said if you're going to work that hard on local news, you might as well start your own site. Patch President Warren Webster pushed backagainst the criticism. — The Financial Times said its web-based app has been a higher seller than the Apple App Store version, and ReadWriteWeb called it abig early victory for HTML5-based app developers in their battle against Apple. — An update on News Corp.'s daily tablet publication, The Daily: It has about 120,000 weekly readers, well below Rupert Murdoch's targets for it. — Finally, a trio of super helpful/valuable posts for journalists: J-prof Paul Bradshaw wrote on what should make up journalists' network infrastructure online, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia's Jon Whiten gave a guide to making longform writing work online, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman urged news organizations to start building apps that solve problems.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-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-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:43:08 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=860

Buy Casodex Without Prescription

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Aug. 5, 2011.] How right do we need to be on Twitter?: It's not particularly uncommon for false information to spread on Twitter under the guise of breaking news, and that's what happened late last week, when several journalists spread the rumor that CNN's Piers Morgan had been suspended from his show as part of the fallout from News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal, which turned out to be untrue. This misinformation, however, led to the most interesting discussion on Twitter and accuracy we've seen in a while. It started with Reuters' Felix Salmon, one of those who tweeted the Morgan rumor, defending the practice of quickly tweeting breaking news (false, in some cases) and then quickly correcting it. "Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false," he wrote. While news organizations' official accounts should stick to confirmed reports, individual reporters should be able to tweet unconfirmed information, Salmon said, as long as they attribute it properly and correct it quickly. Several writers objected to this line of reasoning: Fishbowl NY's Chris O'Shea said Salmon should be committed to tweeting true information because the fact that he's seen as a credible news source is the reason people follow him on Twitter in the first place. The Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman countered that Twitter is much closer to publishing than a newsroom meeting: "The reason people feel a bit of embarrassment after making a mistake on Twitter is precisely because it’s so public." And Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review said Salmon's strategy constitutes a reckless disregard for reporters' individual brand and reputation. Others were more sympathetic to Salmon's point. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pushed back against Rieder, arguing that news is a process, not just the publication of a finished product, and Twitter is part of that process. Salmon's editor at Reuters, Anthony DeRosa, who also tweeted the Morgan rumor, agreed with Salmon that Twitter is a newsroom, but vowed to be more careful to tweet verified information. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry, meanwhile, said that the dichotomy between being first and being right is a false one for journalists — and that journalists should strive for both. — A new tool for the new newsroom: Chartbeat, which does real-time analytics for websites, launched a news-oriented version of its tool last week called Newsbeat. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together a good overview of the service, which includes more detail about traffic trends and sources than Chartbeat. In an interview with GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, Chartbeat's Tony Haile answered the objection that this type of data will just lead to a "tyranny of the popular," arguing instead that the service may instead show journalists how they're underestimating their audiences, or how they can repackage news stories to make them more understandable to readers. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal provided an example from his own experience, noting that Chartbeat has shown that a surprising number of offbeat longform stories there generate big traffic. Newsbeat, he said, could help the mass of news sources fighting for attention online each find their sweet spot. "I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet," he said. At Wired, Tim Carmody emphasized the real-time nature of the information, noting that the need for that kind of information is growing as news organizations are increasingly editing and publishing in real time, too. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber was intrigued by the fact that Newsbeat offers individualized dashboards for each writer and editor's content. The feature, she reasoned, demonstrates the increased encouragement of entrepreneurialism within the modern newsroom: "Increasingly, the gates of production are swinging open to journalists throughout, if not fully across, the newsroom. That’s a good thing. It’s also a big thing. And Newsbeat is reflecting it." — A truly daily tablet publication: Seems almost every other week we have a new entry into the tablet news market; this week it's AOL, which launched its daily tablet magazine Editions this week. All Things Digital and Poynter have good overviews of what the new publication is: Notably, it's delivered to your tablet just once a day (at the time of your choosing), with a set ending page, and without any updates. It's big on personalization, tailoring news to each user a bit like Pandora, and it also includes some local news and, as Poynter noted, primarily aims to recreate the print experience (a fake mailing label, even!). To the people behind Editions, its lack of updates and finite, print-like interface are assets: As one of them told the New York Times, "For a lot of people, [continual updating] becomes oppressive. This is not tapping you on the shoulder all the time." But at TechCrunch (which is also owned by AOL), Erick Schonfeld was skeptical, asserting that if he feels like he's getting day-old news on Editions, he'll just stick to the web. "News apps need to be as current as the Web. Those are just table stakes," he wrote. Mashable's Lauren Indvik, on the other hand, was rather impressed, saying the finiteness of the magazine provides a nice contrast to the unruliness of the web. — The scandal goes stateside: A couple of updates on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal: The story is beginning to migrate across the Atlantic, as attention begins to shift toward several accusations of spying made years ago against News Corp. holdings in the United States. Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke this story open earlier this summer, was reportedly in the States this week investigating News Corp. At New York magazine, Frank Rich urged Americans to look more closely into Murdoch's behavior here: "We’ve become so inured to Murdoch tactics over the years—and so many people in public life have been frightened, silenced, co-opted, or even seduced by them—that we have minimized his impact exactly the way his publicists hoped we would, downgrading News Corp. misbehavior merely to tabloid vulgarity and right-wing attack-dog politics." Two other notes: The News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is surveying subscribers about its image in light of the phone hacking scandal, and the American Journalism Review's John Morton said that for all his faults, Rupert Murdoch's heart is in newspapers, something he appreciates. — Reading roundup: Several things journalists and educators might find useful this week: — Some smaller papers in the Lee Enterprises chain are going to be trying out metered-model online pay plans, which include a small charge for the website even for print subscribers. Poynter's Rick Edmonds explained why. And at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at how the economics of circulation and advertising are moving online. — There are still a few places where print is still king — among the wealthy, for instance, as data from this Ad Age survey show. — A few great how-to's and suggestions: Journalism.co.uk's SEO primer for journalists; Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams' six proposals for journalism education; and a quick guide to data journalism from the Guardian. — Finally, media analyst Alan Mutter made a strong case for why newspapers' business model will never stabilize and urged them to begin "intelligently, and speedily, de-stabilizing their enterprises." It's a case that's been made many times before, but one that probably needs to be heard again.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-getting-it-right-on-twitter-analytics-and-the-newsroom-and-aol%e2%80%99s-tablet-daily/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:07:14 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=854

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 18, 2011.] News Corp.'s scandal keeps growing: Rupert Murdoch might have hoped News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal would die down when he closed the British tabloid News of the World last week, but it only served to fuel the issue's explosion. This past week, the scandal's collateral damage spread to News Corp.'s proposed takeover of the British broadcaster BSkyB: Faced with increasing pressure from the British government and the revelation that News Corp. journalists tried to get private records of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, News Corp. dropped the BSkyB bid, which had been a huge part of the company's U.K. strategy. Plenty of other problems are cropping up for News Corp., too. The top lawyer for its U.K. newspaper branch, News International, quit. The company's stock lost billion in four business days at one point. A pre-existing U.S. shareholders' suit expanded to cover the hacking scandal. The Murdochs have to testify before British Parliament this week about the scandal, and the FBI started investigating U.S.-related aspects of the issue. That's all in addition to the ongoing problems News Corp. faces, as detailed by Poynter's Rick Edmonds. The scandal has led quite a few writers to criticize the culture that Murdoch has created at News Corp. Capital New York's Tom McGeveran and Reuters' John Lloyd railed on Murdoch and News Corp.'s character, Carl Bernstein called this Murdoch's Watergate, and the Observer's editorial board called for systemic reforms in Britain so Murdoch's influence can never be so strong. Members of the Bancroft family said they wouldn't have sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch in 2007 if they'd have known the hacking was going on. On the other hand, the New York Times pointed out that sleazy British tabloid tactics are hardly limited to Murdoch, and media critic Howard Kurtz noted that they're very much alive in the U.S. mainstream press, too. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen defended Murdoch, saying he's been good for journalism on the whole, and Gawker's John Cook defended those tabloid reporting tactics. Meanwhile, j-prof Jeff Jarvis and the Telegraph's Toby Harnden urged the British government not to respond by enacting more regulation. News Corp.'s retreat might not stop with News of the World and BSkyB. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff and others have reported that the company's execs are debating whether to get out of Britain's newspaper business entirely, and several observers chimed in to say that might actually make a good deal of business sense. Media analyst Ken Doctor said News International is losing steam, and the Financial Times' John Gapper said newspapers are becoming far more trouble than they're worth to Murdoch. Not only that, but the New Yorker's John Cassidy said dropping his U.K. newspapers could let Murdoch revive his BSkyB bid, and Jeff Jarvis speculated that when Murdoch chooses between the power that the papers give him and the money saved by getting rid of them, he'll choose the money. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch called the rumors of a newspaper sell-off "rubbish." But just because News of the World and News International may be dead and dying, that doesn't mean newspapers as a whole are, argued David Carr of the New York Times. As he noted, it was the Guardian's dogged reporting that finally broke this story open. Murdoch "prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect," Carr wrote. The Atlantic also had praise for the Guardian, and Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore interviewed one of its editors about the lonely journey of covering the phone hacking story. — HuffPo aggregation under the microscope: A lively discussion about the rights and wrongs of aggregation developed last week out of a column by Ad Age media critic Simon Dumenco, who complained that the Huffington Post had extensively summarized one of his posts, buried the link to the original, and — contrary to Arianna Huffington's argument that her site benefits those they aggregate by sending them readers — gave him just 57 page views. The Huffington Post responded by apologizing and suspending the article's writer. HuffPo business editor Peter Goodman told Adweek the piece was a fully formed article when it should have been a simple introduction and a link, but Dumenco responded to the apology by arguing that the writer did nothing out of the ordinary — this is just how HuffPo tells its writers to do it. Dumenco's point was echoed by several others: The Awl's Choire Sicha said the suspended writer was doing what she was taught, Gawker's Ryan Tate, drawing on a revealing quote from a former HuffPo writer, made the same point: "This is pretty ridiculous, given HuffPo's systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people's news articles." British journalist Kevin Anderson called HuffPo's summary-heavy aggregation "a pretty cynical strategy," and paidContent's Staci Kramer said HuffPo needs to respect its sources, rather than treating a link as a favor. Gabe Rivera, whose news site, Techmeme, was compared to HuffPo favorably by Dumenco, looked for terms to distinguish what his site does from what HuffPo does. Poynter's Julie Moos said some measure of originality will always make for better journalism and a better business model than heavy aggregation, and ZDNet's Tom Foremski pined for the old blogging mentality whose goal was to add value. In a short podcast, author Steven Rosenbaum said this is a logical time to step back and evaluate exactly what constitutes ethical aggregation. There were a few dissenters, though: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and Slate's Jack Shafer both argued that the type of aggregation that HuffPo does has been around for ages in traditional media (especially in Britain, according to Forbes' Tim Worstall). In fact, Shafer said, news orgs could learn a something valuable from the Huffington Post: "That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight." — Comparing Google+, Facebook, and Twitter: It's been just about three weeks since Google+ launched, and Google's new social network is growing like a weed, with estimates of as many as 10 million users so far. (Its number of active users may soon be approaching Twitter's figures.) Google+ news has dominated Twitter, and Google's also working on integrating it with Gmail. With Plus' incredible growth, tech observers have been going back and forth about what social network Google+ is disrupting most. PCWorld's Megan Geuss wondered whether Google+ and Facebook can coexist, and PC Magazine's John Dvorak posited that all the excitement about Google+ is more or less just pent-up frustration with Facebook. The New York Times' David Pogue and Technology Review's Paul Boutin both compared Google+ favorably to Facebook, largely because of its superior privacy controls (though GigaOM's Mathew Ingram pointed out that it may not be a privacy improvement for some people). Meanwhile, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan said Google+ is more comparable to Twitter, then went ahead and made a thorough, smart comparison between the two. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal said Google+ might end up being more conversational than Twitter, which he called more of a call-and-response: Google+ "won't be as good at connecting people to information or each other quickly, but it might be better at longer form discussions and whatever we call the process by which people pull reasoned thoughts from their networks into public discourse." Hutch Carpenter said Google+ resembles both Facebook and Twitter, and Computer World's Mike Elgan wrote that it'll disrupt just about everything. Still, Google+ has its limits: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick explained why he'd never move his personal blog there as some are doing, and Instapaper's Marco Arment and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor both urged readers to keep a space for their own online identity outside of spaces like Google+ or Facebook. For journalists feeling out Google+, Meranda Watling of 10,000 Words put together a preliminary guide. — Reading roundup: Here's what else people were talking about this past week: — The newspaper chain MediaNews made a distinctive play for the tablet news market last week, announcing the launch of TapIn, a location-based news app made specifically for tablets. It'll start in the Bay Area in partnership with the San Jose Mercury News. Ken Doctor, Jeff Sonderman, and Mathew Ingram all wrote about what makes it worth watching. — The Economist continued running pieces all week in its series on the future of the news industry. You can check out several writers'reasons for optimism or read the opening statements in an ongoing debate between NYU's Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr about whether the Internet has been good for journalism. — Boston Globe developer Andy Boyle made his pitch for young journalists to go into web development, or as he put it, "learn to make the internets." — Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together two great social media how-to's for journalists: One on verifying information on social media, and the other on strategies for engagement on Facebook. — Finally, NYU's Clay Shirky gave us another thoughtful essay on the unbundling of news and why the news ecosystem needs to be chaotic right now. In the end, though, here's what he believes news should be: "News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market"; "news has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now"; and "news has to be free, because it has to spread."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:30:10 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=841

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

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 8, 2011.] Google's biggest social effort yet: This is a two-week edition of This Week in Review, so most of our news comes from last week, rather than this week. The biggest of those stories was the launch of Google+, Google's latest and most substantial foray into the social media landscape. TechCrunch had one of the first and best explanations of what Google+ is all about, and Wired's Steven Levy wrote the most comprehensive account of the thinking at Google behind Plus: It's the product of a fundamental philosophical shift from the web as information to the web as people. Of course, the force to be reckoned with in any big social media venture is Facebook, and even though Google told Search Engine Land it's not made to be a Facebook competitor, Google+ was seen by many (including the New York Times) as Google's most ambitious attempt yet to take on Facebook. The design looks a lot like Facebook, and pages for businesses (like Facebook's Fan Pages) are on their way. Longtime tech blogger Dave Winer was unimpressed at the effort to challenge Facebook, and Om Malik of GigaOM said Facebook has nothing to be afraid of in Google+, though All Facebook's Nick O'Neill said Google+'s ubiquity across the web should present a threat to Facebook. But the biggest contrast people drew between Google+ and Facebook was the more intuitive privacy controls built into its Circles feature. Ex-Salon editor Scott Rosenberg wrote a particularly thoughtful post arguing that Google+ more accurately reflects social life than Facebook: "In truth, Facebook started out with an oversimplified conception of social life, modeled on the artificial hothouse community of a college campus, and it has never succeeded in providing a usable or convenient method for dividing or organizing your life into its different contexts." His thought was echoed by j-prof Jeremy Littau (in two posts) and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor. Google's other ventures into social media — Buzz, Wave, Orkut — have fallen flat, so it's somewhat surprising to see that the initial reviews for Google+ were generally positive. Among those enamored with it were TechCrunch's MG Siegler, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, social media guru Robert Scoble, and the Huffington Post's Craig Kanalley (though he wondered about Google's timing). It quickly began sending TechCrunch loads of traffic, and social media marketer Chris Brogan brainstormed 50 ways Google+ could influence the rest of the web. At the same time, there was some skepticism about its Circles function: TechCrunch's Siegler wondered whether people would use it as intended, and ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez said they might not be equipped to handle complicated, changing relationships. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, said Circles look great, but they aren't going to be much use until there's a critical mass of people to put in them. — Google+ and the news: This being a journalism blog, we're most interested in Google+ for what it means for news. As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman pointed out, the aspect of Google+ that seems to have the most potential is its Sparks feature, which allows users to collect recommended news around a specific term or phrase. Former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee said Sparks could fill a valuable niche for news organizations in between Facebook and Twitter — sort of a more customizable, less awkward RSS. The University of Missouri’s KOMU-TV has already used it in a live broadcast, and Breaking News’ Cory Bergman gave a few valuable lessons from that organization’s first week on Google+. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis gave his thoughts on a few potential uses for news: It could be very useful for collaboration and promotion, but not so much for live coverage. Journalism.co.uk's Sarah Marshall listed several of the same uses, plus interviewing and "as a Facebook for your tweeps." Sonderman suggested a few changes to Google+ to make it even more news-friendly, including allowing news org pages and improving the Sparks search and filtering. Still, he saw it as a valuable addition to the online news consumption landscape: "It’s a serendipity engine, and if executed well it could make Google+ an addictive source of news discovery." A bit of Google+-related miscellany before we move on: Social media marketer Christopher Penn gave some tips on measuring Google+, author Neil Strauss condemned the growing culture of Facebook "Likes" (and now Google +1s), and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram offered a rebuttal. — Murdoch kills News of the World: In one of the most surprising media-related moves of the year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. suddenly shut down one of its most prominent properties, the 168-year-old British tabloid News of the World, on Thursday. The decision stemmed from a long-running scandal involving NotW investigators who illegally hacked into the phones of celebrities. This week, the Guardian reported that the hacking extended to the voicemail of a murdered 13-year-old girl and possibly the families of dead soldiers, and that the paper's editor, Rebekah Brooks (now the head of News Corp. in Britain) was informed of some of the hacking. Facing an advertising boycott and Parliamentary opposition, Murdoch's son, James, announced News of the World will close this weekend. (The Guardian has the definitive blow-by-blow of Thursday's events.) It was a desperate move, and as the New York Times, paidContent, and many on Twitter noted, it was almost certainly an attempt to keep the scandal's collateral damage away from Murdoch's proposed BSkyB merger, which was put on hold and possible in jeopardy this week. Though the closing left hundreds of suddenly out-of-work employees, it may prove less damaging in the big picture for News Corp. than you might expect. NotW only published on Sundays, and it's widely suspected that its sister tabloid, the Sun, will simply expand to include a Sunday edition to cover for its absence. As one Guardian editor stated, the move may simply allow News Corp. to streamline its operation and save cash, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds called it a smart business move. (Its stock actually went up after the announcement.) There's plenty that has yet to play out: The Guardian pointed out how evasive James Murdoch's closing letter was, and Brooks, the one that many thought would take the fall for the scandal, is still around. And the investigation is ongoing, with more arrests being made today. According to the New Yorker's Ken Auletta and CUNY's Jeff Jarvis, though, the buck stops with Rupert himself and the culture he created. — Making journalism easier on Twitter: Twitter has been reaching out to journalists for quite some time now through a media blog, but last week it took things a step further and launched Twitter for Newsrooms, a journalist's guide to using Twitter, with tips on reporting, making conversation, and promoting content. The Lab's Justin Ellis gave a quick glimpse into the rationale behind the project. A few people were skeptical: TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis suspected that Twitter's preaching to the choir, arguing that for the journalists who come across Twitter for Newsrooms, Twitter already is a newsroom. The Journal Register's Steve Buttry called it "more promotional than helpful," and suggested some other Twitter primers for journalists. Ad Age's Matthew Creamer added a tongue-in-cheek guide to releasing your anger on Twitter. Meanwhile, the Lab's Megan Garber reported on the ideas of NPR and Andy Carvin for improving Twitter's functionality for reporting, including a kind of real-time influence and credibility score for Twitter sources, and a journalism-oriented meme-tracking tool for developing stories. — Mobile media and tablet users, profiled: There were several studies released in the past two weeks that are worth noting, starting with Pew's report on e-reader and tablet users. Pew found that e-reader ownership is booming, having doubled in six months. The Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran reasoned that e-readers are ahead of tablets right now primarily because they're so much cheaper, and offered ideas for news organizations to take advantage of the explosion of e-reader users. Three other studies related to tablets and mobile media: One study found that a third of tablet users said it's leading them to read print newspapers and magazines less often; another showed that people are reading more on digital media than we think, and mostly in browsers; and a third gave us more evidence that games are still king among mobile apps. — Reading roundup: Bunches of good stuff to look through from the past two weeks. I'll go through it quickly: — Turns out the "digital first" move announced last month by the Guardian also includes the closing of the international editions of the Guardian and Observer. Jeff Jarvis explained what digital first means, but Suw Charman-Anderson questioned the wisdom the Guardian's strategy. The Lab's Ken Doctor analyzed the economics of the Guardian's situation, as well as the Mail and the BBC's. — This week in AOL/Huffington Post news: Business Insider revealed some leaked lackluster traffic numbers for Patch sites, and reported that Patch is undergoing a HuffPo-ization. That prompted Judy Sims and Slate's Jack Shafer to be the latest to rip into Patch's business model, and Shafer followed up to address rebuttals about non-Patch hyperlocal news. — Google+ was the only interesting Google-related news over the past two weeks: The Lab's Megan Garber wrote about Google's bid to transform mobile ads, potential new directions for Google News, and Google highlighting individual authors in search returns. The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan also wrote on Google's ongoing war on "nonsense" content. — A couple of paywall notes: The Times of London reported that it has 100,000 subscribers a year after its paywall went up, and Dorian Benkoil said the New York Times' plan is working well, the Lab's Megan Garber wrote about the Times adding a "share your access" offer to print subscribers. — Three practical posts for journalists: Poynter's Jeff Sonderman has tips for successful news aggregation and personalized news delivery, and British j-prof Paul Bradshaw reported on his experience running his blog through a Facebook Page for a month. — And three bigger-picture pieces to think on: Wetpaint's Ben Elowitz on the shrinking of the non-Facebook web, former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell on the U.S.' place within the global media ecosystem, and the Economist on the role of news organizations in a citizen-driven media world.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-what-google-could-do-for-news-and-murdoch%e2%80%99s-news-of-the-world-gets-the-ax/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:23:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=838

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

This Week in Review: WikiLeaks’ new rivals, Ongo’s aggregation play, and Demand Media makes a splash

Buy Minocycline Without Prescription

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 24, 2011.] The New York Post's iPad block: News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch has developed a reputation for draconian policies toward paid content and the web, and he furthered that pattern this week when News Corp.'s New York Post blocked access to its website from the iPad's Safari browser in an effort to sell more of its iPad apps. A subscription to the app runs .99 per month; access to the website would be free. The reaction on the web was overwhelmingly negative: Tech pioneer Dave Winer accused the Post of "breaking the web," paidContent's Staci Kramer called it "one of the most poorly conceived paywall efforts I’ve come across," and business journalist Adam Tinworth called the move "dictatorial." As Kramer and Examiner.com's Michael Santo noted, the Post left plenty of workarounds for users who don't want to pay up, through alternative browsers like Skyfire. Kramer and Engadget's Dana Wollman also suspected that Murdoch is attempting to recreate the Post as an app-based tabloid like his other major effort, The Daily. (Both are skeptical about the prospects of that plan.) News Corp. does have some good news on the iPad front this week, though: The Post and The Daily are the two highest-grossing publishing apps on the iPad, ranking well ahead of the next-most-lucrative apps — two comic-book apps and Conde Nast's New Yorker and Wired. Poynter's Regina McCombs talked to three other iPad app publishers — CNN, the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record, and Better Homes & Gardens — about how they put their apps together. And the Columbia Journalism Review's Zachary Sniderman compared the iPad's adoption process to that of print periodicals before it: The iPad's sales, he said, "mirror a long trend of historical adoption rates and cultural attitudes: initial enthusiasm for a new platform, slow adoption, and then gradually increasing sales as the population gets habituated to using the new technology." — A fresh round of news innovation: This week was a big one in news innovation, as the Knight Foundation (one of the Lab's funders) announced the 16 winners of the last round of its five-year Knight News Challenge competition. The Lab's Joshua Benton gave a good annotated roundup of the winning entries, which will get a total of .7 million: There are a few names many people will recognize, including former New York Times/ProPublica project DocumentCloud, the AP's (and the Lab's) Jonathan Stray, and the crisis text-mapping service Ushahidi. I would expect profiles of several of the winning projects over the next week or so, and the Lab's Justin Ellis provided the first with a look at the Chicago Tribune's PANDA, which aims to help newsrooms analyze data more easily. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noticed the data journalism theme running through the winning entries, and elsewhere, the Daily Dot's Nicholas White opined on the importance of data in journalism. Benton's post also included a glance at what's next for the News Challenge, as well as highlights of what has and hasn't gone well over the News Challenge's short history from a recently released internal review. Some of the main challenges: Underestimated difficulty of citizen journalism and news game projects, problems with accurate cost budgeting, and a slow timetable. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman also looked back at some of the lessons learned from the News Challenge. The Knight Foundation also announced a three-year, .76 million investment in MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, which named Berkman Center researcher Ethan Zuckerman its new director. The Lab's Andrew Phelps talked to Zuckerman about where the center is headed, and Zuckerman looked at his goals in a post of his own. Mathew Ingramwondered whether the center can help with the ongoing reinvention of local journalism. — Two legal wins for aggregators: Rulings were handed down this week in two cases that probably only media-law nerds have following, but both have big implications for online news aggregation and link journalism. In the first case, a federal court ruled that a financial site can publish analysts' stock tips immediately, a blow to a legal principle called the "hot news doctrine" that protects certain facts ("hot news") from being republished for a short period of time. (Here's a great explainer of the case from last year.) This was one of those rulings where everyone declares victory: The court actually upheld the validity of the hot news doctrine in the Internet/aggregation era, but said it didn't apply in this case — the analysts are newsmakers and the website is the news breaker, the judge wrote. As Dealbook noted, the lawyer for Google and Twitter (who filed anti-hot news doctrine briefs) called it "a great decision for the free flow of information in the new media age," while the pro-hot news AP called it "a victory for the news media and the public." But as paidContent's Joe Mullin argued, it looks as though this decision will ultimate weaken the hot news doctrine. In the other case, the copyright enforcement firm Righthaven had its lawsuit on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal dismissed. Righthaven had sued a message-board user for reposting a 19-paragraph Review-Journal editorial, but the judge ruled that the posting was protected under fair use because the editorial only contained five paragraphs of purely original opinions and because it was posted for noncommercial reasons. — A renewed debate over anonymity: There have been a handful of streams of discussion regarding anonymity online over the past few weeks that converged a bit this week, and I thought it might be helpful to summarize a couple of them briefly for you. Two weeks ago, a supposed lesbian blogger in Syria was unmasked as a middle-aged American grad student, prompting thoughtful responses from people like the Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman and on the role of participatory media and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and the Berkman Center's Jillian York on the continued need for anonymity. And last week, a couple photographed kissing in the streets amid riots in Vancouver was identified online and making the mainstream-media rounds within days, prompting questions about the end of anonymity by writers like the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Salon's Drew Grant. Meanwhile, former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard decried anonymous online commenting, calling it "faux democracy" and urging news organizations to require commenters to use their real names. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram drew on several of those developments to echo Gillmor's and York's defenses of anonymity, arguing that it's been a key part of healthy democracy, allowing people to speak to the powerful without fear of reprisal. (The AP's Jonathan Stray called it "the digital analog of right to free assembly.") "We shouldn’t toss that kind of principle aside so lightly just because we want to cut down on irritating comments from readers, or stop the occasional blogger from pretending to be someone they are not," Ingram wrote. — Reading roundup: Here's what else happened at the intersection of journalism and technology this week: — Outgoing New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who's done a fair amount of Twitter-tweaking over the past month or so, gave an interview to Reuters in which he said the idea that he's opposed to social media is a misconception. But sociologist Zeynep Tufekci took issue with his idea that social media use leads to less time with "real-life" friends, and when Keller asked for evidence, she let him have it. The Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran also defended social media's usefulness to journalists with some new Pew data. — This Week in AOL: Two more former employees gave their own horror stories about working there — one a writer, the other from sales. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong also said he's considering paid content as part of the company's continued revamp, the Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum pondered the AOL Way and the journalistic "hamster wheel," and Poynter's Steve Myers said comparisons between the Huffington Post and the New York Times are unfounded. — Another potential player in the ongoing long-form nonfiction renaissance, Byliner, launched this week. The Lab and Poynter ran previews. — Finally, the interesting pieces on the FCC's recent report on the future of local news continue to trickle out. Here's a pointed analysis by the folks at Free Press and a two-part Columbia Journalism Review interview with the report's lead writer, Steven Waldman.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/07/09/this-week-in-review-an-ipad-web-block-a-new-set-of-news-innovators-and-aggregation%e2%80%99s-legal-victories/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:05:59 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=815

Buy Adipex Without Prescription

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

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 27, 2011.] Censorship, the law, and Twitter: If we hadn't already learned how social media are opening the traditional media's gatekeeping role to the masses, we got a pretty good object lesson this week in Britain. Here's what happened: To keep the British tabloids from digging into an alleged affair with a reality TV star, Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs took out a British court provision called a super-injunction that prohibits media from identifying him and reporting on both the story and the very fact that a super-injunction exists. But the super-injunction was no match for Facebook, Twitter, and soccer forums, where thousands of people talked about Giggs and the affair in spite of (and because of) the order. Since then, a Scottish newspaper and a member of Parliament have both named Giggs, rendering the super-injunction essentially ineffective and causing quite a bit of handwringing over whether gag orders are a lost cause in the Twitter age, and whether or not that's a good thing. Giggs sued Twitter for the breach, and some members of Parliament started looking for ways to control the site. Prime Minister David Cameron said Twitter made Britain's injunctions "unfair" and "unsustainable" for traditional media and urged Parliament to change them. Some people, including World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and the Guardian's Richard Hillgrove, said the problem lies with Twitter, not the law, with Hillgrove (rather absurdly) suggesting a delay mechanism to monitor posts before they go up: "Twitter and Facebook are not blank sheets of paper. They are media publishers like any other." Others faulted the law instead: At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said it allows the wealthy to play by different rules, and the Telegraph'sHarry Mount said that thanks to the web, "a form of people power has been effectively absorbed into that new body of privacy law." The Vancouver Sun's Mario Canseco documented the failure of gag orders in the Internet age in Canada, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM advised courts and governments to quit trying to enforce antiquated laws, saying they "may not like the implications of a totally distributed real-time information network, but they are going to have to start living with it sooner rather than later." Then, of course, there's the question of whether the anonymous online super-injunction violators have any legal repercussions to worry about. As the New York Times noted, Twitter has been resistant to turning over its users' identities in the past, though a Twitter official said this week it will hand over user info to the authorities if it's legally required to. But even with Twitter's compliance, there would still be hurdles to clear in identifying users, the Telegraph explained. — iPad channels for big and small media: Several big-media publications neared or hit iPad milestones this week: On stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, The Daily's Greg Clayman said it's nearing a million downloads since it was launched in January. Clayman wouldn't say how many paid subscribers the News Corp. iPad-only publication has (a far more interesting figure in determining The Daily's viability), but Adweek's Lucia Moses said The Daily will announce its number of paid downloads — it only started charging in March — once it hits a "target level." Meanwhile, Wired and GQ were made available for in-app subscriptions through Apple App Store this week, after their owner, Condé Nast, became one of the first major publishers to strike a deal with Apple for in-app subscriptions earlier this month. Another major publication, Playboy, launched an iPad subscription outside the App Store, because it obviously has some difficulty complying with Apple's "no nudity" policy. Playboy's app is essentially an iPad-optimized website, which might seem like a tempting option for publishers who don't want to deal with Apple's restrictions, but as Mashable and GigaOM explained, Playboy might be uniquely positioned to pull this off where others can't. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram looked at those cases and weighed the pluses and minuses for publishers of getting into bed with Apple. Of course, big publishers aren't the only ones getting into the iPad game: At paidContent, Ashley Norris, CEO of a small publishing company that just released an iPad app, argued that indie publishers could play a key role in developing the tablet magazine. Flipboard is a pretty ideal model for those publishers: It's valued at 0 million, and SiliconAngle's Tom Foremski said it exemplifies the current en vogue tech-bubble business plan: "find free content and organize it into a useful interface." That niche might not play as big of a part in the iPad market as we think, though: As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted via ReadWriteWeb, news apps make up only 3% of all the apps in the App Store. — Driving more traffic from Facebook: Facebook has been working hard lately to cozy up to news organizations, and this week it provided some statistics that may have some of those organizations looking more closely at integrating Facebook into their sites. According to stats Search Engine Land got from Facebook (so grain of salt, etc.), the average media site integrated with Facebook has gotten a 300% jump in Facebook referral traffic, and ABC News, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post have all reportedly doubled their traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins. Meanwhile, Fortune's Peter Lauria talked to Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik about the possibility of news orgs charging on Facebook using Facebook credits, like some Facebook games do now. As it's been known to do, Facebook played a big role in the aftermath of another natural disaster this week when a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. The local newspaper, the Joplin Globe, told Poynter about how they set up a Facebook page to help people find family and friends in the tornado's wake. Elsewhere in social media and news, the New York Times experimented this week with a human-powered Twitter feed, as opposed to its usual mostly automatically driven style. The Times' Liz Heron (and a couple of other newspaper social media editors) talked to Poynter's Jeff Sonderman about their Twitter strategies, and Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words looked at how the experiment changed the Times' Twitter feed. Heron also revealed the Times' informal social media guidelines at the BBC's Social Media Summit: "Use common sense and don't be stupid." — Reading roundup: Not a lot of big future-of-news stories this week, a several smaller things worth keeping an eye on: — Google notified publishers late last week that it's abandoning its project to scan and archive hundreds of years of old newspapers. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes lamented the decision, and Paul Balcerak urged newspapers to pick up where Google left off. — This week's AOL/Huffington Post bits and pieces: Huffington Post Canada has been launched, AOL's Daily Finance has been made over, and some HuffPo staff are reportedly leaving because they're upset with how the AOL/HuffPo marriage has gone so far. Meanwhile, even though AOL's content is free, CEO Tim Armstrong expressed his general belief in paid content online. — Ben Huh of the Cheezburger network of comedy sites announced he's working on what he's calling the Moby Dick Project — an effort to reform the way news is presented and consumed online. ReadWriteWeb gave more details of the type of software he's developing. — A couple of addenda to last week's linking discussion: Former Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry wrote about solving the workflow issue at newspapers, and at the Guardian, Dan Gillmor called out lazy linking — linking to a summary, rather than the original piece — in online aggregation. — CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis made a case for news as conversation and the value of comments, and at 10,000 Words, Alex Schmidt wrote about the way poisonous online comments can affect reporters. — Finally, Canadian media consultant Ken Goldstein issued a paper looking at decline circulation of newspapers in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. He included a possibly remarkably prescient 1964 quotation by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:01:39 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=813

Buy Adalat Without Prescription

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

Buy Casodex Without Prescription

]]> [This week's review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 20, 2011.] Twitter on the brain: Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller got a rise out of a lot of folks online with one of the shortest of his 21 career tweets: "#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss." Keller revealed the purpose of his social experiment this week in a column arguing, in so many words, that Twitter may be dulling your humanity, and probably making you stupid, too. Here's the money quote: "my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity." This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well online. There were a couple strains of reaction: Business Insider's Henry Blodget and All Twitter's Lauren Dugan argued that Twitter may indeed be changing us, but for the good, by helping make previously impossible connections. Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick of Techdirt countered Keller by saying that while Twitter isn't built for deep conversations, it is quite good at providing an entry point for such discussion: "What you see publicly posted on Twitter and Facebook is just the tip of the conversation iceberg," Tsotsis said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, defended Twitter's true social nature, and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci gave a fantastic breakdown of what Twitter does and doesn't do culturally and socially. Two of the most eloquent responses were provided by Nick Bilton, one of Keller's own employees, and by Gizmodo's Mat Honan. Bilton pointed out that our brains have shown a remarkable ability to adapt quickly to new technologies without sacrificing old capacities. (Be sure to check out Keller's response afterward.) Honan made a similar argument: Keller, he said, is confusing the medium with the message, and Twitter, like any technology, is what you make it. "If you choose to do superficial things there, you will have superficial experiences. If you use it to communicate with others on a deeper level, you can have more meaningful experiences that make you smarter, build lasting relationships, and generally enhance your life," Honan wrote. — Google gets more local with news: Google News unveiled a few interesting changes in the past week, starting with the launch of "News near you." Google has sorted news by location for a while now, but this feature will allow smartphone users to automatically get local news wherever they are. ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski explained why newspapers should be worried about Google moving further onto their local-news turf, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram criticized newspapers for not coming up with like this themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, on the other hand, said Google's feature is still in need of some human curation to go with its algorithmic aggregation. That's an area in which local newspapers can still dominate, he said, but it'll require some technological catchup, as well as a willingness to get over fears about linking to competitors. Another change, not publicized by Google News but spotted by the folks at Search Engine Land, was the addition of an option to allow users to filter out blogs and press releases from their results. This raised the question, what exactly does Google consider a blog? Google told Search Engine Land it relies on a variety of factors to make that decision, especially self-identification. Mathew Ingram ripped this classification, and urged Google to put everything that contains news together in Google News and let readers sort it out. — Fitting linking into news' workflow: A discussion about linking has been simmering on Twitter on and off over the past few weeks, and it began to come together into something useful this week. This round of the conversation started with a post by web thinker and scholar Doc Searls, who wondered why news organizations don't link out more often. In the comments, the Chicago Tribune's Brian Boyer suggested that one reason is that many newspapers' CMS's and workflows are print-centric, making linking logistically difficult. CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson responded that the workflow issue isn't much of an excuse, saying, as he put it on Twitter: "At this point 'linking' has been around for twenty years. The fact that this is STILL a workflow issue is almost worse than not caring." This kicked off a sprawling debate on Twitter, aptly chronicled via Storify by Mathew Ingram and Alex Byers. Ingram also wrote a post responding to a few of the themes of resistance of links, particularly the notion that information on the web is inferior to information gained by old-fashioned reporting. British journalist Kevin Anderson took on the workflow issue in particular, noting how outdated many newspaper CMS's are and challenging them to catch up technologically: "It’s an industrial workflow operating in a digital age. It’s really only down to ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ thinking that allows such a patently inefficient process to persist." — AOL's continued makeover: Another week, another slew of personnel moves at AOL. PaidContent's David Kaplan reported that AOL is hiring "a bunch" of new (paid) editors and shuffling some current employees around after its layoff of hundreds this spring. Overall, Kaplan wrote, this is part of the continued effort to put the Huffington Post's stamp on AOL's editorial products. One of the AOL entities most affected by the shifts is Seed, which had been a freelance network, but will now fall under AOL's advertising area as a business-to-business product. Saul Hansell, who was hired in 2009 to run Seed, is moving to HuffPo to edit its new "Big News" features. In a blog post, Hansell talked about what this means for HuffPo and for Seed. Meanwhile, the company is also rolling out AOL Industry, a set of B2B sites covering energy, defense, and government. But wait, that's not all: AOL's Patch is launching 33 new sites in states targeting the 2012 election. The hyperlocal news site Street Fight also reported that Patch is urging its editors to post more often, and a group of independent local news sites is banding together to tell the world that they are not Patch, nor anything like it. — Reading roundup: As always, plenty of other stuff get to this week. — We mentioned a Pew report's reference to the Drudge Report's influence in last week's review, and this week the New York Times' David Carr marveled at Drudge's continued success without many new-media bells and whistles. Poynter's Julie Moos looked at Drudge's traffic over the years, while the Washington Post disputed Pew's numbers. ZDNet's David Gewirtz had five lessons Drudge can teach the rest of the media world. — A few paid-content items: A Nielsen survey on what people are willing to pay for various mobile services, Poynter's Rick Edmonds on the New York Times' events marketing for its pay plan, and the Lab's Justin Ellis on paid-content lessons from small newspapers. — A couple of tablet-related items: Next Issue Media, a joint effort of five publishers to sell magazines on tablets, released its first set of magazines on Google Android-powered Samsung Galaxy. And here at the Lab, Ken Doctor expounded on the iPad as the "missing link" in news' digital evolution. — Columbia University announced it will launch a local news site this summer focusing on accountability journalism, and the Lab's Megan Garber gave some more details about what Columbia's doing with it. — The Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Kirchner had an interesting conversation with Slate's David Plotz about Slate's aggregation efforts, and in response, Reuters' Felix Salmon made the case for valuing aggregation skills in journalists. — This weekend's think piece is a musing by Maria Bustillos at The Awl on Wikipedia, Marshall McLuhan, communal knowledge-making, and the fate of the expert. Enjoy.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-what-twitter-does-to-us-google-news-gets-more-local-and-making-links-routine/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:40 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=905

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

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

Buy Adipex Without Prescription

]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] A heavyweight enters the tablet ring: Amazon became the latest company to jump into the tablet market this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet that will run on Google's Android system. It's a 7" touch-screen tablet that's essentially a knockoff of the BlackBerry Playbook — much smaller and cheaper than Apple's iPad. Amazon also revealed three new Kindle models ranging from $79 to $149, two of them touch-screen, as well as a new Kindle Fire-only web browser, Silk (more on that at the LA Times). The two most comprehensive early looks at the Fire came from Wired's Steven Levy and Bloomberg's Brad Stone. Levy looked more at the device itself, describing it as a way for Amazon to spotlight its non-book media library and saying its biggest challenge is to Netflix. Stone looked more at the corporate strategy behind the Fire, noting that it "funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing." (Sounds like a certain other tablet we know.) By the end of launch day, several tech sites like TechCrunch and ZDNet had already declared the Fire the winner of the hypercompetitive Android tablet market, and Ad Age said it would soon have tablet consumption taking off. The bigger question, then, was whether the Fire would present the first real threat to Apple's iPad. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal summed up the Fire's challenge to the iPad — smaller, cheaper, and the first media experience as thoroughly integrated as Apple's App Store. As the Atlantic's Alesh Houdek put it, the Fire may do most everything tablet owners really want, only for a lot less than the iPad. But ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow said the Fire can't match up to the iPad, and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and paidContent's