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Newsroom (Index)
1. Working Writers, 2. Fast Cash Freelance, 3. Screenwriting News, 4. Writers Write, 5. Writers in the Sky, 6. Study Student News,7. Freelance Blogging News, 8. Photography News, 9. Graphic Design News, 10. E-Media Tidbits, 11. Bloggers Blog,
12. Creative Freelancing, 13. Copyright Law, 14. Book Deals,
15. Book Publishing News,16. Readers Read, 17. Literacy News,
18. Write Better, 19. Horror Fiction News |
 E-Media Tidbits
• What 15 Journalists Took Home from South by Southwest
by Steve Myers
18 Mar 2010 at 8:17am
I can't find "Austin hangover" on Urban Dictionary, so I'll define the term myself: the mental exhaustion that follows four days of pouring new ideas into your head at South by Southwest Interactive. (It can be accompanied by a traditional hangover, though it's not required.)
Every time slot at South by Southwest is filled with several intriguing panels and presentations, so I missed more than I saw. But I can rely on the many journalists there among the game designers, developers, entrepreneurs, filmmakers and Web hipsters.
I asked these reporters, journalism educators, social media managers, developers and designers to share what sparked their imagination and what they're thinking about.
Laura Hertzfeld, managing editor, EconomyStory.org
I was struck by what French director Michel Gondry said about the essence of creativity. He said that artists are inspired by the people around them, and that he sees creativity in people who don't always see it in themselves.
The art that goes into what journalists do often is overlooked. I think there is a lot of creativity that goes into our work -- not in the reporting sense, but in thinking about how to present inform... ( cont'd )
• How to Make Crowdsourcing Sustainable and Productive
by Steve Myers
18 Mar 2010 at 7:42am
In just four years, crowdsourcing has moved from a newly-coined term to an increasingly common practice. Now some Web heavyweights, from Digg.com to Wikipedia, approach a variety of tasks by enlisting the wisdom -- and work -- of the crowd.
Scott Belsky, founder of a creative services company called Behance, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, director of design and user experience for Digg.com, believe it's time to outline some principles and dispel some misconceptions for the crowdsourcing era. At South by Southwest Interactive they outlined what can make a crowdsourced project work and what can make it fall apart.
Their panel was one of several panels that considered the implications of crowdsourcing for everything from online media to Netflix to programming.
Belsky and Kalmikoff don't work in news, but their advice is relevant for an online news operation considering this approach.
The wisdom of the crowd, Belsky and Kalmikoff noted, is often code for "free labor." How often have organizations turned to crowdsourcing simply because they didn't have the resources to do something themselves?
Instead, a successful crowdsourced project must foster a strong sense of com... ( cont'd )
• Gmail Team Offers Lessons on Innovation, Project Management
by Steve Myers
15 Mar 2010 at 9:30am
A continuing theme at South by Southwest Interactive is figuring out how to foster innovation at organizations. A team of Google employees shared some thoughts on Sunday about how they create and improve upon services such as Gmail, Google Talk and Google Buzz.
It became clear that although these people have achieved plenty of successes, they are familiar with failure -- mostly private, sometimes public.
Their thoughts are relevant for any organization, particularly news organizations, trying to change how they do their work.
Strive for a goal, even if you don't know how to achieve it. Jonathan Perlow, a senior engineer on the Gmail team, said the e-mail service was created to achieve three things:
Offer e-mail that didn't require people to delete messages Create a user experience comparable to desktop e-mail applications Block spam -- all of itWhen these goals were outlined, Perlow said, no one knew how to accomplish them, but they firmly believed that they were worth striving for.
"Either we're going to figure out how to make a great user experience or we'll die trying," Perlow said. "Most of the things we try, fail."
Create a culture of execution. Edw... ( cont'd )
• Liveblogging SXSW: The Future of Context in Journalism
by Steve Myers
15 Mar 2010 at 7:30am
One of the continuing conversations about how to improve journalism is how to cover ongoing stories. Specifically, how do journalists provide the context that shows people the big picture, not just the latest developments?
NPR's Matt Thompson (a former Poynter staffer), has been interested in this idea for some time time, blogging about it at Newsless.org and researching it during a Reynolds fellowship.
Monday at 9:30 a.m. CDT, Thompson will lead a discussion on this question at South by Southwest Interactive with Jay Rosen of New York University, Staci Kramer of paidContent and Tristan Harris of Apture.
Thompson, Rosen and Harris have posted some initial thoughts on the issue at Future of Context.
I will live blog the event and lead a discussion below. You can also follow #futureofcontext on Twitter to keep up with the conversation.
<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=0f05374708" >South by Southwest: Live Blogging "The Future of Context"</a>
• Danish Magazine Publishes Collaboratively Using Google Wave
by Ernst Poulsen
13 Mar 2010 at 2:54am
One of the big questions in online journalism is how to engage users. A small Danish experiment on Google Wave may provide some hints.
In the last 10 years, we have learned that subtle changes in format on the Web can create vastly different products and user habits. Although they're both based on the simple article format, newspaper Web sites are vastly different from Wikis when it comes to the level of participation.
So what happens if you launch a magazine on Google's collaborative tool "Wave"? That's the question consultant Bjarne Tveskov, a former LEGO designer, wanted to answer. He named the magazine "Bølgen," which is Danish for "The Wave."
"The idea was to create a shared space with some short articles and story bits to kick start conversation and co-creation. I also see "Bølgen" as a kind of "Third Place," Tveskov told me by e-mail. "It is not as controlled and personal like a (group) blog, but it's not quite a completely open free-for-all like a traditional wiki either."
After 12 issues, what has been different in terms of content and participation compared to other publications?
"I have been positively surprised by the amount of participation that... ( cont'd )
• Msnbc.com Uses Slide Show for In-Depth Narrative Story
by Steve Myers
11 Mar 2010 at 1:09pm
Like most investigative reporters, the culmination of Bill Dedman's reporting is generally an article or a package of articles. As he worked on his latest project, he collected images and documents that helped tell the story of a wealthy, elderly heiress who owns several expansive homes but doesn't appear to live in them.
When he was ready to write, he decided that, rather than craft a 2,500-word story, he'd rely on the images he had shown to his family and coworkers, accompanied by captions. The slide show would be an experiment, a way to see if in-depth reporting could be presented in a way that would reach far more people.
Judging by the response, it may have been. Dedman told me that he's received 500 e-mails from readers about the story, entitled, "The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery." That's more than he's received for any story he's done in 30 years. And with 78 million page views, that's more than any other story on msnbc.com.
Dedman and I corresponded by e-mail and discussed how he decided to do a slide show, what he gained and lost with this story form, and whether this can work for other stories. Here's an edited version... ( cont'd )
• Can Informal, Explanatory Videos Increase Engagement on News Sites?
by Steve Myers
9 Mar 2010 at 2:44am
When I look up a word on Merriam-Webster OnLine, I'm usually in a hurry. But I've stumbled across something that could get me to stick around longer.
A few months ago, I noticed a video player labeled "Ask the Editor" in the top right corner of the site. It seemed interesting, but not enough to slow me down, until I noticed one day that the video was entitled "Slang." I'm always interested in slang -- who isn't? -- so I watched it.
The video is what you'd expect: An editor explains why the dictionary includes slang. Interesting enough, if you're into words.
But in the process, the editor explains how the people at Merriam-Webster approach their work. She describes how she horrified someone by saying that she was in the process of defining the word "props" -- gasp! She goes on to say that the dictionary should reflect how language is used and offers examples of common words that once were lexicographical stepchildren.
That video changed a transactional visit into an exploratory one. At first, I was like the person who comes to a news site through Google, spending just seconds on a page as I looked for a piece of information. When I clicked on the video, I ... ( cont'd )
• Gearing Up to Build an iPad App? Consider a Mobile Web App First
by David Stanton
8 Mar 2010 at 5:57am
The iPad is being heralded as both a savior and enslaver for newspapers. It may finally provide the kind of futuristic, multimedia newspaper experience so often depicted in sci-fi. Unfortunately, playing with Apple carries heavy restrictions on what code can be used to build native applications, a significant revenue split, and serious, perhaps capricious, content restrictions.
For most news companies, getting a native app on the iPad will mean:
Hiring an outside firm to do the application development because nobody in-house works in the Objective-C language used on Apple devicesGiving away 30 percent of revenueNot knowing if your application will be approved or approved and later removedIgnoring the majority of smart phone (BlackBerry) owners There is another way: Use the people and skills within the newsroom to build Web apps that mimic the look and functionality of native applications.
It depends on the platform, but you can deliver a experience comparable to native code by using a Web app paradigm and relying on HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the front end. The big difference is that the Web app will not be able to access the device's hardware the same ... ( cont'd )
• News Orgs Challenged in Covering Live Events Like Health Care Summit with Immediacy and Depth
by David Johnson
4 Mar 2010 at 11:53am
A Flickr image of a dual-screen setup at a Superbowl party this year shows the game on the big screen and a second screen for the Twitter conversation. The headline: "This is the future."
Now, let's look at the present: online media coverage of President Obama's health care summit last week. Many news sites streamed live video of the summit, and some created innovative presentations that added value and context and engaged audience via social networking.
Here's what I saw as I surfed around some sites covering the live event: Yes, video quality and the online social space have come a long way since the '90s, when I cobbled together tiny RealMedia G2 streams and Java chat appliances.
Still, news orgs find it a challenge to present live events in a way that fulfills the Internet's potential of providing the immediacy of broadcast, with the depth of print.
Many sites are trying to improve user experience for live hybrid interactive video events, but the organizations that covered the health care summit most creatively were not the ones with the biggest budgets, largest audiences and deepest technology departments. Independent new media, using embeddable to... ( cont'd )
• 'Hybrid' Models the Rage Among Execs at paidContent Conference
by Dorian Benkoil
22 Feb 2010 at 1:27pm
If there's one thing media bigwigs agreed on in hours of discussion at the paidContent conference in New York on Friday, it's that to make a profit from media you shouldn't ask whether or not to charge for it. Instead you should ask when to charge and when not to, and you should consider e-commerce, events, apps and anything else that can add to your revenue stream.
Devin Wenig, CEO of Thomson Reuters' Markets Division, summed up the sentiment when he told an interviewer on stage that Reuters.com, now ad-supported, will in the coming months include a mix of advertising and paid services, "just like, I suspect, just about everyone you're going to talk to for the next day."
He was just about right. Advertising execs, the publisher of The New York Times, entrepreneurs, journalists and many others talked about mixed, or "hybrid," revenue streams. They seemed eager to point out all the different ways they're earning money through unconventional means.
KC Estenson, CNN.com senior vice president and general manager, noted that CNN's iPhone app costs $1.99. (The app is ranked 66th in the iTunes store as of this writing.) The app itself has a second revenue stream:... ( cont'd )
• 5 Strategies to Lower Your Site's Bounce Rate
by Mallary Jean Tenore
22 Feb 2010 at 4:37am
There are lots of ways to draw users to news sites. The trick is figuring out how to keep them engaged enough to stay on your site once they land there.
Some news sites, including Forbes.com, The Huffington Post and DailyMe, have developed strategies to increase engagement and decrease bounce rates -- a metric used to describe the percentage of single-page site visits, often traffic referred by search engines.
Here are a few examples of their strategies, along with some additional tips that could help keep people on your site. I hope you'll share your ideas, too.
Collect data about what people are looking at on your site and show them more content like it. The folks at DailyMe, a site that provides a roundup of the day's news from various media outlets, has created a new technology called Newstogram.
The cookie-based technology, which is being marketed to various news organizations, does a metadata analysis to identify keywords, names, places and other relevant information in the stories that users read. Based on the results, the technology finds stories that a user is likely to be interested in. Links to these stories appear in a module that news organiz... ( cont'd )
• Thoora Shows How Publishers Can Use Real-Time Audience Data for Editorial Decisions
by Dorian Benkoil
12 Feb 2010 at 7:13am
To the list of companies that say they measure audience sentiment to help publishers' editorial judgment, add the name Thoora.
The Toronto-based startup promises to gauge how well individual news stories are doing by analyzing and calibrating real-time data from blogs, mainstream news sources and Twitter. Thoora's software uses more than 100 attributes to determine not only the most popular content but also the highest quality, using measures such grammar and spelling and the authority of sites that link to the content.
The company said the data could be used to figure out, for example, where to position an article on a page (aiding internal data from Web logs and analytics), how to apportion resources to cover a developing story or even how to follow up on offshoots that you might not have considered. It could help a news organization determine where its individual story ranks against competitors covering the same thing.
CEO Mike Lee said this is the first time that a tool has approached audience sentiment for news at the story level rather than the topic level. For example, after Serena Williams lashed out at a line judge at the U.S. Open, Thoora spotted... ( cont'd )
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Newsroom (Index)
1. Working Writers, 2. Fast Cash Freelance, 3. Screenwriting News, 4. Writers Write, 5. Writers in the Sky, 6. Study Student News,7. Freelance Blogging News, 8. Photography News, 9. Graphic Design News, 10. E-Media Tidbits, 11. Bloggers Blog,
12. Creative Freelancing, 13. Copyright Law, 14. Book Deals,
15. Book Publishing News,16. Readers Read, 17. Literacy News,
18. Write Better, 19. Horror Fiction News |
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