Entries written in April 2008
Disturbingly accurate and very funny. Via British sketch comedy collective Idiots of Ants.
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Written April 30, 2008 in links
Due to my previous comment issue and the theme I was using not being supported any more, I decided to redecorate. Plus, being that I am talking about online journalism and the “future” of the medium, I thought it fitting that I have a more streamlined, futuristic theme. I’m quite pleased with it actually, though [...]
I’ve been incredibly impressed with the online presence of the Las Vegas Sun. There’s something about the site that just breathes and feels welcoming. One area where they are shining is their multimedia offerings. Like I mentioned in a post yesterday, they include a multimedia link as an integral part of their navigation.
There it is, right there at the top just screaming ‘Click Me!’
One of the pieces they ran recently was a video piece bomb testing and demonstration held by the Las Vegas Fire Department in the Nevada desert. What I liked most about this was that when you go to the video it is large and in your face with excellent quality. It’s big, loud and begs you to ‘Watch me!’ (Yes, I’ve managed to anthropomorphize Web pages, back off!)
Too often sites have their videos squashed into a tiny box along with the story. While many do offer a full-screen option, sometimes a near full-screen view as the default would better serve the piece. They way I see it, your organization paid the reporter or reporters to check out the story, film it and then paid your video team to edit and package the video. Why not play it up as much as you can? You’re paying these people for their hard work, show it off! The Las Vegas Sun is doing an excellent job of that.
The second thing I liked was that the Sun offers the video in a downloadable, MP4 format, in both iPod sizes and even in 720p HD. The effort may not see worth it now, but if people start downloading your site’s videos, sharing them and then word gets around that you offer these things on your site, the traffic will follow.
As an aside, I don’t know how much the complicated ownership structure the Sun has with the Las Vegas Review-Journal has to do with it (which I’m sure it does), but their site is refreshingly lite in ads. This may be a bad thing for them eventually in an increasingly revenue-centric model, but for now, it’s great.
I could go on and on about the Sun’s site, but I’ll let you decide. Check it out, they are a great example of design meeting journalism in a great way.
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Despite what Craig Ferguson says, the NYTimes is still leading the charge in many areas of journalism, most notably in the online world. The Times has been continually improving their online user experience and things seem to have really moved ahead since they took down their pay wall, something that all newspapers should do right [...]
In perusing several newspaper Web sites I noticed an oddity. Many sites, though I won’t mention any names, did not have a ‘multimedia/interactive/data” tab as part of their navigation. For most of them it was shoved halfway down the page, sometimes even several scrolls below the main content. This is a travesty at this stage [...]
From Ryan Sholin’s post on ‘10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head’:
J-schools can either play a critical role in training the next generation of journalists, or they can fade into irrelevancy. Teach multimedia, interactivity and data, or watch your students become frustrated and puzzled as they [...]
Right now newspapers use a variety of tools to update their Web sites. Some use proprietary content-management systems similar to Wordpress or MoveableType, while others maintain simple, yet highly customizable HTML pages. Different sized organizations are still getting their online legs and figuring out what works best for them.
None of these systems have been perfected [...]
Guest lineup for the Sunday TV news shows:
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ABC’s “This Week” — Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.; former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D.; Reps. Artur Davis, D-Ala., and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.
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CBS’ “Face the Nation” — David Axelrod, campaign adviser for Barack Obama; Howard Wolfson, campaign adviser for Hillary Rodham Clinton; Roger Mudd, author of a book on [...]
A quick rundown of some of today’s interesting articles:
Editor & Publisher is reporting that only 11 top newspaper Web sites are reporting an increase in time spent.
Mark Glaser of MediaShift interviews William Bastone, creator of ‘The Smoking Gun’.
Philip M. Stone: “Let’s rename the newsroom the content room.”
Ruth Hochberger of HuffPo thinks it “…it will be [...]
You may have heard that NYT columnist Thomas Friedman was recently hit with a pie at a speech he was giving. Yes, above is the video. The proof is in the pudding, or meringue perhaps.
Friedman has been under fire since an appearance on Charlie Rose where he summed up the War in Iraq by saying: “Suck on this!”
What does this have to do with online journalism? Nothing, it’s just rather hilarious. Carry on.
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You may or may not have noticed that social networking site Facebook recently launched its online, real-time chat service. The beauty of it is, much like Gmail chat, it is integrated into your Facebook front end with nothing to install and no changes to make. You can disable it, but it’s an opt-out feature rather [...]
All right, that’s it, I’m packing it up. No need for me to be yammering away about online journalism stuff when people like Shawn Smith have everything covered over at New Media Bytes. Smith is a senior news producer at MLive.com, the online arm of Booth Newspapers in Michigan.
Honestly, his blog is the most comprehensive [...]
(See second story)
My obligatory smattering of links for today:
Chicago’s ‘RedEye’ is using Facebook to connect to readers, even so far as putting some of them in print.
Nina Simon at Museum 2.0 talks about the cost of Web 2.0 ventures, not in dollars however, but in time spent.
Election 2.0 = virtual debates.
Two things that need to [...]
Consumer shopping research firm Scarborough Research, a Nielsen Media affiliate, has released its 2008 Newspaper Audience Ratings Report. The SNARR, besides just being a fun word to say, can be a useful and quick measure for newspapers, but it is not a perfect measure.
CLICK HERE to read the report. (PDF)
What does all of this mean?
The [...]
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