May 09, 2008
Zooming In on Online Video: A Development & Growth Guide
Last year, research from the Newspaper Association of America revealed that the majority of newspaper Web sites features video. Results from this 2008 NAA survey, which looks more closely at the area, show newspapers' video operations are quite extensive. This is a pleasant and encouraging surprise from an industry going through a difficult period of change.
To help newspapers further develop their video initiatives, NAA has developed a guide to online video.
May 07, 2008
Newsroom Barometer: Partly Sunny Skies Ahead for Industry
World Editors Forum, Reuters release report
There are some really interesting results in the World Editors Forum/Reuters Newsroom Barometer report, released late yesterday. Zogby International conducted the survey. Here are a few of the results, with comments:
56 percent believe most news will be free in the future, up from 48 percent in 2006. This is good for democracy, giving more people access to more information, and maybe good for advertising, since more people may see advertising if the content around it is free. However, print circulation revenue does contribute a bit to most news companies’ bottom lines, so we’ll have to see how the numbers play out.
63 percent believe within 10 years, the most common form of news consumption will be electronic (online, mobile or e-book-style readers). This one is also mixed: Good for the environment (less paper), but we all know quite well that online CPMs and print advertising rates are very different. Even The New York Times Assistant Managing Editor said this week in an online chat that NYTimes.com revenues would not support the entire newsroom.
86 percent said an integrated print/online newsroom will be the norm in the near future. It’s good that news organizations are realizing this – integration, cross-platform collaboration and more will make the end product better, both in revenue and audience. However, as the report notes, many newspapers have bridges to cross before they get to that point.
According to the John Zogby’s analysis of the report, “For these editors the future is self-evident and our survey shows that they see the writing on the newsroom wall. The evolution of the 4th Estate is no longer questions of if, when or how. Editors now know the solution: Innovate. Integrate. Or perish.”
May 06, 2008
Behind the Winning Entries: Vita.mn
Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities.
Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site (circulation group 250,000 or more): Vita.mn
Entry submitted by:
Matt Thompson
Minneapolis Star Tribune
(612) 673-4000
Vita.mn, the Star Tribune’s database- and user-powered arts and entertainment site, is now about a year old. In that time, we’ve implemented a new design, new functionality, blogs, articles, and an innovative user-reward scheme called “karma.”Users have responded by writing more than 10,000 top-ten lists for more than 800 topics, tagging more than 27,000 items, submitting more than 1,100 venue reviews and delivering more than 1.9 million pageviews.
One of our biggest experiments and biggest successes with vita. mn over the past year has been “karma”, the system we created for determining the site’s most valuable users. Users receive karma points for creating and contributing content, and receive exponentially more karma when their contributions inspire other users to participate. Every month, we award prizes to the users who’ve earned the most karma during the month. This has proven to be a popular, enjoyable, effective and transparent way of giving back to the users who contribute the most. The community of users that has coalesced around the site treats karma like a spectator sport, coming back each month to view the fun. (Read a conversation about October’s karma contest here.)
Lists showed early promise as being one of the flagship features of vita.mn. That promise was fulfilled this year with a special franchise issue of the associated weekly print product – “The List of Lists.” The issue was a reverse-publishing triumph, featuring a 19-page spread created by aggregating more than 3,000 lists written by site users.This user-centric take on the typical arts-and-entertainment weekly’s “Best of ” issue brought in plenty of positive buzz from blogs, local businesses and advertisers, and especially from users.
We’re now pioneering an approach to blogging that complements vita.mn’s interactive, democratic style. Our “Alexis on the Sexes” blog aggregates the site contributions of our sex and dating columnist – top-ten lists, venue reviews, event comments, forum posts and more. This means every post, as well as being interesting content in itself is an invitation to users to engage with these features of the site. Disagree with Alexis’ review? Post your own.
The past year has seen the addition of user-submitted photos for venues and events, which appear on the home page and most section fronts, as well as on the appropriate listings pages.
We’ve added interactive maps to venue and event pages. We recently partnered with a company,
InRadio, to deliver a Flash widget, updated weekly, featuring music from artists performing in the Twin Cities during the upcoming week(you’ll find this widget on the home page).
In October, we launched a redesign that drew nothing but positive reaction from users and bloggers. As part of this redesign, we made the site’s section fronts more dynamic, using the power of tagging to pull in relevant lists, guides and discussions from all over the site.
May 02, 2008
How to Get Your News on Google News Fast!
Short answer: API
A person from Google (who’s name I didn’t catch!) came to the NewsTools 2008 Conference this afternoon and gave a very helpful rundown of how to get your breaking news article onto Google News faster….
Newsroom and Community Connection Map
More from NewsTools 2008
Please check out these two awesome diagrams. They’re not directional, point-A-to-point-B maps. These are value network maps: The first diagram looks at the old news story (who’s involved, where the connections are between audience, source, producers, advertisers, etc.); the second one, below, looks at the emerging news ecology (editors as “sense makers” and a very different pathway between the audience, sources and others). These brilliant maps were drawn up by Sherrin Bennett with collaboration from the Journalism That Matters team.
For me, the maps were like a massive brain-dump (in the most positive sense of the term). A lot of us here at the NewsTools conference had pieces of these maps in our heads, in that we all had at least a theoretical understanding of these networked online and offline connections in the news world. The maps make these ideas concrete.
Separately, Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review wrote about some of the problems with journalists, based on conversations he had yesterday at the conference. Among them: Impatience with unsolved problems (and a low tolerance for imperfection), and an unwillingness to serve drinks and dessert (the fun, lighthearted and interesting stuff) along with the vegetables (hard-hitting, investigative pieces) of journalism.
May 01, 2008
NewsTools 2008: Coverage
I’m in Sunnyvale, Calif., attending NewsTools 2008, part of the Journalism That Matters series. The conference brings together 150 technology people (social network builders, programmers, online community managers), journalists from legacy media companies, bloggers and broadcasters.
The goal of the conference is to look at participatory journalism and technology and discuss the opportunities and possibilities. In an e-mail to participants, Bill Densmore (of the Media Giraffe Project and one of the conference organizers) wrote, “We’re willing to share (perhaps irrational) exuberance about the future of journalism and participatory democracy – a sense of possibility, not dread.”
Tonight, Scott Karp (of Publish2) and Vineet Gupta (of Daylife) led a small-group discussion about aggregation as content, link blogging and how reliably sending people to interesting and useful places elsewhere on the Web can build loyalty. Google is one of the most popular sites in the world, Karp pointed out, and all Google does is send people off to other sites. Newspapers that present not only their own content, but also present relevant and interesting links to other content, can build audience loyalty the same way.
In the spirit of that conversation, I’ll send you off to blogs that are covering this conference more thoroughly than I can alone.
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