23 Sep 08 ‘EPIC 2014′, revisited

It’s interesting how much of this video, made back in 2005, is starting to come true. Will they save the journalism industry? With today’s unveiling of the Google Android phone, Google continues it’s “epic” growth over the media landscape.

And I for one welcome our new media overlords and look forward to toiling away in their underground research labs.

Also of interest is the NYTimes profile of HTC and its founder, Cher Wang. Gives a little bit of insight on why Google chose HTC (and HTC chose Google) for the hardware of their phone. Investors, start throwing your money at HTC stock now, if you have any left that is.

P.S. And to further prove my point of the impending Google take over, I switched my theme to a Google Chrome-based one that was available about a day after Google Chrome debuted.

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Tags: journalism, video

24 Aug 08 Jay Rosen on the political conventions

Via BigThink.

Just a note to BigThink, nix the ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ colors on the videos.

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17 Aug 08 New models for print journalism are popping up all over, so stop whining

If you follow the world of journalism, or even read the newspaper, you know that the industry is in “turmoil,” or so they say. It is chic right now to talk about the death of the newspaper industry, the end of journalism as we know it and a half-dozen other clichéd statements being trotted out on the increasing number of journalism blogs these days.

The tidal wave of buyouts and layoffs industry wide, plus the machinations of Sam Zell & Co., have given both journalists and ex-journalists alike a lot of ammo and fingers to point at the current state of the print journalism world. A lot of this outcry is due to journalists seeing an industry which they love and have studied crumbling and changing before their eyes, a valid concern.

The problem I have with a lot of this is that all of the venom-spitting in the world isn’t going to change the way things have turned out. Sam Zell, Randy Michaels and Lee Abrams have a plan for Tribune and no amount of TellZell whining is going to change that. Blog all you want, it’s not going to change the ad structure and revenue models of your standard newspaper that are in steady decline. Trust me, I hate it too and wish much of it wasn’t happening, but the reality is that it is happening.

Our industry, not just print journalism but journalism in general, is changing and evolving. This is a good thing. The problem seems that many journalists aren’t willing to go through the birthing pains of changing the face of journalism, even young journalists. In my experience there are still kids coming out of journalism school that have that delusion of being the fedora-wearing, beat journalist who just hits the streets with a notepad and their wits. While that’s all well and good, it’s not enough and it’s the old model.

Nothing I’m saying here is new and many others have said it better. My point is, the cure for the death of print journalism is already out there, staring us in the face, all anyone has to do is step up and be willing to take a risk because they truly love journalism. Here are a few examples of what I am talking about:

MinnPost.com
Started by a group of ex-journalists, including former Star-Tribune publisher Joel Kramer, MinnPost was their answer to what they felt was the decline of high-quality journalism in the Twin Cities. MinnPost is a non-profit journalism outfit that uses an online and a print-on-demand model. They focus on investigative journalism with a focus on politics, government, science, health and culture. Last I read they were one of the few news organizations in the black.

SportingNews
Now the Sporting News is not a new organization, they’ve been around since 1886. However, there is obviously a reason they’ve survived so long, they innovate. News designer Charles Apple recently joined the Sporting News to help launch their new e-newsletter. Though the paper is supposed to continue print publication as a bi-weekly later this month, this e-newsletter format is something that more organizations should be willing to try. People still want the portability of a paper so why not give it to them while at the same time saving the organization on printing costs. We’ll have to see how this is working out in six months but I think it is a great idea.

Spot.us
Spot.us is an experiment in non-profit, crowdfunded journalism that is scheduled to launch this fall. The project was started by journalist David Cohn after he won the Knight News Challenge. According to the site:

“Spot Us” is a nonprofit that allows an individual or group to take control of news in their community by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists to write important, or uncovered news stories.

Will it work? Who knows, but its boldness and Cohn’s willingness to try something innovative is more than admirable, it’s what the industry needs.

ProPublica
You may have heard of ProPublica already, the independent, non-profit newsroom that squarely focuses on investigative journalism. Investigative journalism is one of the fastest casualties of the slimmed down newsroom. Less journalists equals less time and resources to dig into those real meaty stories that newspapers are supposed to be known for. According to their site, they are “…the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States.” Whether you agree or not, ProPublica looks poised to pick up where traditional news organizations are losing out.

TheUptake
A citizen-journalism Web site, The Uptake has garnered recent attention for a member-submitted story about the protests in Beijing, China. Their motto: “Will journalism be done by you or to you?” Many trained, educated journalists take issue with the citizen-journalism movement but there is merit to having eyes and ears on every corner. News organizations can’t hope to cover every angle of a story and that is where sites like TheUptake pick up the slack. I’m not sure of the history of the site and couldn’t find anything on it, maybe someone from the site can shed some light.

These are just a few examples of bold new steps for journalism and I’m sure there are more. My point here is that the solution to this supposed destruction of modern journalism is not going to come from new owners, publishers or executives. No, it’s going to have to come from the true journalists that love this business, this life and love getting the news to the people that want to read it, listen to it or see it.

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Tags: journalism, new media

25 Jun 08 Buyouts 2.0

In an interesting twist, William M. Hartnett of the Palm Beach Post has been Twittering his buyout meeting.

Some highlights:

- No details yet on layoff severance package if buyouts don’t meet job cut goals. Just “less generous.” 9 minutes ago from web
- Guy in front row is staring at the ceiling. 7 minutes ago from web
- Separation pay taxed at normal rate, unless received as lump sum. 13 minutes ago from web
- They’ll be “exited” that day. Sounds menacing. 15 minutes ago from web
- Last day for buyout recipients: Tuesday, Aug. 12 16 minutes ago from web
- Max 52 weeks, for those here more than 26 years. 20 minutes ago from web
- Not quite enough for that yacht I was hoping to get. 22 minutes ago from web
- Two weeks of pay and benefits for every year of service. 23 minutes ago from web

What’s funny about this, and what so many others are doing right now, is that for once everyone has no fear about what they are putting online. The general consensus seems to be, “What are you going to do, fire me?”

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Tags: buyouts, news business, twitter

19 Jun 08 NY Times goes social, slighly endorses Firefox over IE

The New York Times has added a social feature to its site called TimesPeople (beta). While not a full-fledged social network, the new feature allows people to create a profile, add friends and share articles.

Its most clever ability is its interaction with social-networking behemoth Facebook. Users can connect it with an NYT Facebook application and when articles are tagged, they show up in their FB newsfeed. As the engineer in the video puts it, “this let’s people who normally wouldn’t be reading the New York Times see and read articles that they might find interesting.”

Again the NYT does it right. They created a new feature, not as an add platform or simply a revenue booster, but as a way to draw more people into the NYT Web site and get their content into the wild. Kudos.

EDIT: Oops, I kind of left this point out.

Right now the app seems to be Firefox exclusive, which may have been an intentional F.U. from the engineers to Microsoft, or it may just be because it is still in beta. Still, I thought that was an interesting choice considering IE still has a larger portion of the Web browser market share (though it is slipping more and more every day.)

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Tags: new media, social networking, Web2.0

16 Jun 08 Online Journalism Review to cease publication

Yup, the OJR is going to stop the publication of it’s Web site. From Robert Niles in the final post:

This is the final post at OJR. After a decade, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of the website. The archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles.

One of OJR’s goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I’m pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to the KDMC website and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, SensibleTalk.com. I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

That’s a shame, I really liked OJR. Niles and his cohorts posed some interesting questions and had some great discussions on their site. I also liked the network and group feel of the site. It made you feel like you were a part of something.

But, the show must go on, as the cliché goes. Thankfully Niles will continue to blog on his own site so we online journalism geeks won’t be without his wise words and inquiries.

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Tags: journalism, new media, online journalism

14 Jun 08 Ira Glass on storytelling

Ira Glass, host of NPR’s This American Life, explaining his take on storytelling. I think a lot of this can be appropriated to how we need to start telling stories online, be it by video, audio or just in words.

Now, this isn’t a cure-all template that can and will always work, but it’s a good way of thinking when it comes to good storytelling. If anything, if you are a big fan of TAL but don’t really know why, this sort of explains it.

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14 Jun 08 NCMR 2008

This is AdBusters’s video from the NCMR 2008 in Minneapolis. I am so upset that I missed this. I left Minnesota the week before this conference began. Hopefully they’ll bring it back to the city next year.

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Tags: media reform, new media, video

11 Jun 08 It’s official! I’m moving to the Twin Cities

After a long and difficult decision between two great opportunities, I finally had to choose. I am now an Associate Editor for Online News at Minnesota Public Radio, part of the American Public Media Group. The next few weeks will be spent handling the logistics of moving 1,600 miles, getting acclimated to the Twin Cities and learning my new role as part of the MPR team.

Once I get settled this blog will come alive again, especially once I’m playing a large role in the online development of such a creative and diverse news organization. I’m looking forward to having a more direct perspective of the online journalism world as we enter this age of broad and sweeping change in our beloved industry.

To say I am excited about this opportunity would be putting it mildly. Yay for the future!

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06 May 08 NY Times puts out the call for help on Myanmar cyclone disaster

With the death toll in Myanmar rising following the cyclone that devastated the area, the NY Times used its blog, ‘The Lede’, to put out the call for help covering the disaster. They asked for first-hand accounts, photos and even have a submission form for video.

Twelve hours later they had vivid descriptions of the devastation and pictures to accentuate those descriptions. Below is an account from Henry Webb, a lawyer from the U.S. that teaches in Vietnam:

About 3 a.m., when we were about 40 or 50 miles outside of Yangon, we started seeing the first trees and signs that had been blown down. (I did not sleep during the taxi ride — the Spanish couple slept off and on and I was afraid that if I went to sleep the driver might fall asleep as well — despite the fact that he was chugging Red Bull and coffee throughout the night.)

It took about two hours to cover those remaining 40 or 50 miles to the airport, and it was only in those last two hours — between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. — that we began to appreciate the amount of devastation wrought by the cyclone. There were long stretches where nearly every tree along both sides of the road had been blown down, split into, uprooted, etc.

Almost all of the billboards were shredded, and most other signs had been either torn apart or blown down, and I saw several street signs — like stop signs or yield signs (the writing was in Burmese script so I don’t know what they actually said) — that had literally had their metal poles bent in half by the force of the winds. Many streetlights were also blown down. Many of the buildings had been damaged, and there was wind-blown debris everywhere.

| MORE |

This is the sort of “open-source” journalism that I think is going to push online content into the future. On the smaller scale news organizations could cover everything from city council meetings to softball games in the same manner, by allowing citizens to watch, report and file small pieces about what they see.

The eroding of the sense of community newspapers are supposed to build could perhaps be saved by again allowing citizens to be a part of the news process. No longer should they feel they are just being fed the news but that they are contributing to the overall process of distributing the news and spreading information.

This doesn’t meant that journalists have to feel like they are obsolete or that citizens are going to take over their paper. It simply means that by allowing the people to have an avenue to contribute then we have more eyes and ears on the streets. We still act as the filterers, the organizers and the distributors of the news.

We’ll have to wait and see how the NY Times and other organizations continue to cover this story and what they do with the content they get.

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01 May 08 Today is RSS awareness day

You know the geek demographic is taking over when they are starting to make holidays out of Web technologies. I for one welcome our new geeky overlords and look forward to toiling away in their underground server rooms. But I digress.

According to Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips today is indeed RSS Awareness Day. So if you or your newsroom are totally clueless about this RSS thing, what better day than today to hold a quick boot camp or primer on one of the most useful and simple Web technologies available.

Don’t feel like explaining it all, just send this video from RSSDay.org around to your team (it’s a little hokey but it gets the point across):

Then have them read Shawn Smith’s post from yesterday and they’ll be all set. Create a Feedburner account for your news organization, burn some feeds and start syndicating. With the final assimilation of Feedburner by Google it is no doubt going to become a more robust and useful tool over the next few months.

So there you have it, spread the word!

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Tags: new media, online journalism, Web2.0

01 May 08 The tale of the Cougar Ace, the perfect storm

The Cougar Ace was a car transport ship that was en route from Japan to Vancouver, British Columbia, Tacoma, Washington, and Port Hueneme, California, with a cargo of 4,812 Mazda vehicles. On the way a malfunction caused ballast water to dump out and the ship listed 60 degrees putting both crew and cargo in danger.

Since the story was first reported it has been followed by journalists of all stripes. The entire tale, from the initial accident to the salvaging of the ship to the final fate of the close to 5,000 vehicles, is a multi-layered and fascinating story.

Wired contributor Joshua Davis wrote a brilliant story that focused on the salvaging effort of the Cougar Ace. His vibrant descriptions and literary format make the salvage team, a rogues gallery of hardened characters that makes the hardened seaman of ‘The Deadliest Catch’ look like a bunch of Long Johns Silver employees, come to life. Take the time to read it, it’s worth it.

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Tags: article, online journalism, wired

29 Apr 08 Online feature: Las Vegas Sun, ‘Bomb Demonstration’

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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Tags: multimedia, new media, online journalism

29 Apr 08 Dissecting the NYTimes.com with design director Khoi Vinh

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 now.

The NY Times is running week long, Talk to the Newsroom segment with Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com. What’s great about the interaction is that the questions are reader questions and not bland interviewer questions. It’s really a great chance to look behind the curtain and see what’s really going on in Oz.

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26 Apr 08 What would make the best news Web site CMS platform?

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 and most continue to evolve as technology increases. Eventually, however, most major news organizations are going to have to either have in-house developers in their technology department or hire contract Web developers create a CMS platform so they can stay competitive and relevant in an increasingly malleable online world.

Here’s a quick list of what I think would make the best news Web site CMS and/or what should be included in any news Web site CMS platform. It should be noted that some of these might be more wants than needs, some might already be in use by news organizations and some might not even be technologically possible, yet.

List below the jump.

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Tags: new media, technology