Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Category: Recommended Links Page 1 of 4

My recommended links to online news and resources from Delicious and more.

Link roundup: Twitter news, tech tools and a shameless plug

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On January 20, 2011

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

On the Twitters

  • In their “The science of the hashtag” post, Twitter charts the lifecycle of a hashtag and spells out just what and who propelled it to popularity. In short – celebrities > media, as if you didn’t already know.
  • An alleged Twitter expert says research shows that to increase your chances of being retweeted, you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends.
  • I don’t know if Jay Rosen is a Twitter expert, but he’s been known to craft a good 140 characters. He explains his process and what makes a tweet “beautiful”.
  • Nieman Storyboard makes the case that Twitter is a great community for building and telling a narrative story, using TBD’s Storify as an example.

Tips & Tricks

Random industry news

  • The Huffington Post may have created what many of us have dreamed of for years – a news recommendation engine based on collected data. Tie in advertising and we might as well all go home and let them take over the world.
  • Not everyone’s a fan of it, though, and with good reason.
  • Former TBD GM (and my former boss) Jim Brady chats with Jason Policastro about his work with Philly.com’s new collaborative journalism initiative, online advertising, funding hyperlocal sites and more.
  • Ken Doctor outlines the metrics and numbers journalism outlets should be keeping an eye on in 2011. This goes way beyond web traffic and Twitter analytics. Great read.
  • The NY Times reports Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, which developed a system to charge newspaper sites’ most frequent online visitors for content access, has good news. They analyzed preliminary data from the project’ initial sites and found that “advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite predictions otherwise”. The Times, of course, really really wants this to succeed.

Shameless plugs

Link roundup: Demographics, Quora, Instagram and news from old media

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On January 10, 2011

In New Technology, Recommended Links

File under “Good to Know”

  • In not-at-all-shocking news, a Pew study shows the Internet Gains on Television as Public’s Main News Source . Since 2007, the number of 18 to 29 year olds citing the internet as their main source has nearly doubled, from 34% to 65%. Not surprising numbers, but notable nonetheless. This should have TV stations that rely on their newscasts as the sole breaking news source shaking in their boots.
  • Twitter Media gets into what makes good hashtags work. As someone who frequently struggles with the issue of deciding when and how to use hashtags, this post on the well-known hashtag work of 106 & Park really underscores why theirs work so well. For one, they aren’t forced news tags.

New-ish Tools for News

  • Last week, online media watchers wet their collective pants over Instagram, an iPhone photo-sharing application with a built-in social network, when Mashable highlighted how NPR is using it to connect with its audience. NPR, as usual, is out connecting on another app before everyone else – but whether this experiment will pay off is another story. As of right now, the app is only on iPhone, but it’s user base is growing by leaps and bounds. Judging from the comments on the Mashable post, those using it aren’t pleased at the prospect of influx of media.
  • On a related note, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal gives a good and personal explanation of Instagram’s appeal.
  • I didn’t wet my pants, but I fell in love with Instagram too. I’ve started using its nice filters on my personal Tumblr project, 365 Snapshots.
  • I’m not sure where it started, but there was also a new media gold rush last week to Quora, an online question-and-answer oriented discussion site. Everyone wants to know how it could be used for journalism, especially since it is such a tame, smart (on the surface at least) community that is curating information. My colleague Daniel Victor blogged about some potential uses and started a topic on Quora looking for ideas (very meta) and. We’ll see where it goes. I know my coworkers at TBD are hard at work on this one.

Paywalls, paywalls!

  • The Dallas Morning News is taking a lot of content behind a paywall, with the old argument “because we have to” and “other newspapers do it”. The comments do not belie a supportive readership. The monthly digital-only price seems quite high to me.
  • The Daily O’Collegian, the campus newspaper for Oklahoma State, is also going behind a paywall for non-local readers. This may be the one instance in which I think a paywall makes perfect sense for a newspaper. It does make me feel for the student journalists who will try to use their links there for clips, however. Maybe they can give out a special coded version or something?

Real names are the answer – again

Fun Project

  • NY Times project Mapping America: Every City, Every Block allows users to browse local data from the Census, based on samples from 2005 to 2009 on an easily understood map. I’m in love with it and wish TBD had the budget to build something similar.

Link roundup: How we’re getting paid this week

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On December 29, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

Monetizing location at the local level

My former employer, the Cincinnati Enquirer, has launched a long-simmering idea for a locally-based Foursquare-esque app. The location-based app, called Porkappolis, is available for use worldwide, but has a local focus. It’s similar to a lot of other location-based services, but the potential for local deals and gameplay could make it a real player.  We’ll see how it plays out – perhaps it can be an early example for other media venturing into the app space.

Newsflash: iPad hasn’t saved print yet

WWD reports that iPad magazine sales have gone down in the fall after the device’s summer debut. While this isn’t some larger sign that the iPad and other e-readers won’t help to fund news organizations in the long-term, it is a sign that the pricing structure may be all wrong right out of the gate.

As the commenters at WWD point out, the price structure for iPad magazines isn’t affordable or at all comparable to their print counterparts. Sure, some new iPad owners will buy that first issue to try it out on the new device, but they won’t continue if the price is continually as much or more than that of  print edition. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

More Facebook = More Web Traffic

Facebook lays out the numbers for how news organizations like the Washington Post, Sporting News and Cracked have fared since further integrating the social networking tools into their sites.

Int he provided examples, at least, Facebook widgets, Connect and Open Graph integrations have led to a boost in referrals to those sites due to increased link-sharing, recommendations and comments from Facebook users. It’s hardly surprising, but it is a further indication that news sites that are closed off to including Facebook widgets and integrations are missing the boat on the web traffic they can provide.  Maybe it’s time to shake that corporate template, eh?

Recommended reading: Investigative social media, new ideas and tools

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On November 24, 2010

In Recommended Links, Social Media, TBD

Sorry it’s been so long, but it’s been crazy busy as TBD’s preparing for the holidays and other events. This’ll be a quick one, just a few links I’ve been reading of late. Have a happy Thanksgiving, folks.

Social media roundup

  • How Investigative Journalism Is Prospering in the Age of Social Media – Great ideas from several resources gathered by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable on how to use social media in investigative reporting and newsroom projects. Includes tips on Crowdmap, Storify, Twitter crowdsourcing, data searches and more. A great post to pass on to the social media haters in your newsroom.
  • RockMelt: The User Manual– If you don’t know about Rockmelt or want to know more on how to use the new social browser, here’s a great guide from the NY Times.
  • 6 innovative uses of Tumblr by newsrooms – The big media companies are only now getting into Tumblr, but there’s a lot of possibilities out there for it.
  • Engaging Facebook fans with clever, conversational updates – Great ideas from Web Up the Newsroom for writing interesting status updates on a media outlet’s Facebook page to drive traffic to content and drive discussion online.
  • In this disturbing bit from FishbowlDC, a Washington Post editor says “crediting the original source of a scoop isn’t “a requirement or even important” because “all news originates from somewhere” and “unless one is taking someone else’s work without attribution (that is, plagiarizing it) any news story should stand on its own and speaks for itself as an original piece of work.” Hm.
  • How News Organizations Are Generating Revenue From Social Media – Another great Mashable rundown of the top ways online media is generating revenue using social media and more to hit new audiences.

On the TBD Front

Link roundup: Facebook deals, Times paywalls, ONA and news experiments

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On November 3, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

Geolocation meets deals

Last news first. Facebook announced today that it will be doing more with its location feature, including offering deals tied to location. This could spell trouble for other geolocation providers like Foursquare and Gowalla, group buying sites like Groupon and, sadly, news sites looking for revenue streams. Facebook is offering these deals for free right now – and who’ll buy the proverbial cow through the likes of us when they can get the milk for free from Facebook?

A consumer/business side take on Facebook Places from D.C. blogger Lisa Byrne at DCEventJunkie outlines the potential on the local level. Facebook seem to have a lot of options for businesses of many sizes and kinds (including charities) to take advantage of the deal service.

Paywalls busted

Also today, GigaOm declares It’s Official: News Corp.’s Paywalls Are a Bust. NewsCorp’s Times (in London) lost 90% of its online traffic after putting up a paywall earlier this year. Somehow, they paint this as success, as they see a smaller online audience that is paying for their service as better than a large one getting it for free. Advertisers, it seems, disagree.

Election Experiments

I blogged here about what TBD was doing for elections (will update today with how that all turned out).The Nieman Lab and Lost Remote documented what news organizations around the country were doing to cover the 2010 election using news media and social media tools. Some great ideas in these posts from the likes of the Huffington Post, NPR and Washington Post.

More Adventures in Storify

Speaking of newsroom experiments, we at TBD are still in love with the tool. Burt Herman, who created the tool, was in the office Monday to tell us a few tips and tricks as well as take suggestions for improvements. Burt is awesome. We’ve been trying it in lots of different instances and news situations. Here’s a few of them:

Online News Association Conference

This was my first ONA conference and I was lucky to have it be in D.C. I volunteered, so I didn’t see many panels, but I was on the Friday keynote panel about TBD’s launch. Since I don’t have great notes, here’s some posts that summed up a lot of the conference’s highlights.

On Jobs (also ONA)

I sat for an interview Friday at ONA with Kent State student Nicole Stempak about journalism jobs for college grads. She asked me to explain how I’ve been fortunate enough to create my own positions in social media and online news since I left college. A few people asked me to share it, so I’m posting it here.

Need-to-Know Twitter Tips for Journalists

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On June 4, 2010

In Recommended Links, Twitter

As we’re hiring new staff members for every position from web producers to listings editors and transit reporters, a lot of my job at TBD will be devoted to bringing all those new hires – plus some of our existing staff from News Channel 8 and WJLA – up to speed on social media tools and practices.

I don’t think it’ll spoil anything to say we plan to use social media quite a bit in every aspect of TBD, so that training will be very important both before launch and as we go into the future and technology changes. Some of our staff, I imagine, will already have a rich background in social media use, while others may not be as comfortable just yet – so many levels of training will be vital.

I’m in the process of officially updating all of my documentation, so I’m in full resource re-evaluation mode. As I post on training plans, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what you think is missing and offer your good examples of social media use you think we should take to heart.

Today – Twitter!

So most of us know now that Twitter is a rich way for reporters to connect with sources and readers as well as build their own brands. In addition to the basics of Twitter use, new users need to know how to find the right journalists, sources and locals to follow, using/understanding hashtags and how they can use Twitter for better reporting. I usually point newb reporters to the work of tweeting reporters on Muckrack and use the live presser tweets from @theHyperFix as a good example of live-tweeting.

There are a million great resources on using Twitter. I’ve collected quite a few I like to use.

The next logical step in Twitter training is using it’s vast amount of data to find information, track trends and find sources for stories. Sites like BackTweets, TweetGrid and Twitter’s own pretty formidable search engine can really help a journalist looking for people tweeting about [insert subject here] in their area and beyond.

Web Up The Newsroom recently had a great post about using Twitter search tools in reporting and sourcing that I think may be the best description of I’ve seen geared toward reporters.

Aside from the data search, Twitter’s geolocation data makes it easy to watch trends and tweets as they happen on a map – which is great if, say, news just broke in a certain area and you want to see what’s happening there from afar. I particularly like Bing’s Twitter maps (which can turn into quite a timesuck if you let it). SocialGreat is also nice if you just want to see what places seem to be trending across all the geolocation platforms.

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If you’d rather see a list than a map of trending local topics, you could check your Twitter home page – or, better yet – check out Trendsmap (using data from another great site, What The Trend). A lot of the time, these are silly chain letter hashtags or obvious news (like how Gulf and Oil are trending here right now), but sometimes you can see reaction to real-time events pop up in these trend searches (check it out right after a celebrity death or during a big sporting event to see what I mean). Trendsmap also has a great visualizer.

If you know what keyword you’d like to track over a course of time, Trendistic has a decent trend graphing application.

Aside from Twitter, there’s obviously a lot of other social media we’ll want to use in our day-to-day operations…but that’s for another post, my friends.

In the meantime, what are your favorite tips and tricks, apps or uses for Twitter I should be sure to pass on as we start training?

Recommended reading: Industry trends and survival skills

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On January 30, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links, Surviving

Industry News and Ideas

  • Is there a flaw in the proposed federal shield law? This scathing rebuttal to an overwhelming support of a Federal Shield Law has definitely caused me some pause. For every organization that needs a shield law to protect sources that deserve it, others can exploit it to push through a salacious story that isn’t true. A much-needed “other side” to the discussion.
  • Reflections of a Newsosaur posits: How long can print newspapers last? Alan Mutter takes a look at the Pew study of newspaper reader demographics to extrapolate just how long the print readership might last. He says the population of print newspaper readers will drop by nearly a third within 15 years and probably be less than half the size it is today by the time 2040 rolls around. Aside from that, how long can newspapers afford to print for that shrinking audience? (He touches on that in part 2, which is linked.)
  • Former journalist Charles Pelton says media outlets are not properly leveraging their talented experts on staff into moneymaking opportunities for fear of ethical impropriety. I agree that his ideas, if handled properly, would not create issues and could create new revenue streams. His analysis is missing a very critical element: He obviously hasn’t worked at a media outlet in the age of mass layoffs. Many papers, in particular, have gotten rid of their on-staff experts and whoever is still left behind are so over worked already they could never take on this extra workload. Let’s mail this back ten years, eh?
  • Michelle McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center is compiling a listing of online-only local news sites, from the corporate hyperlocal networks to independent local sites and blogs. She’s missing quite a few places, but watch this space to see what else pops up.

Surviving

  • The Austin Statesman’s social media editor shares advice on creating fast, easy niche products from existing content. What’s your interest area? Your beat, your section or your newspaper doesn’t have to be the end-all, be-all for what interest your readers – but you can be the trusted aggregator for niche news if you want to be.
  • The OJR’s Robert Niles always has great tips for the reporter looking to build a life outside a newsroom. Here he talks about building a better online presence by shifting your focus from writing stories to creating assets.  This means serving as your own archive and brand manager, building a source base and connecting with readers outside your day-to-day reporting.

A mess of recommended reading

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On January 11, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

I’ve had a bunch of links sitting around I meant to share forever ago, but they fell through the cracks. So if they seem a little late, well, too bad.

Cool Stuff

  • A lot of sites (Cincinnati.Com included) have been running with the idea of expanding data coverage on local crime, but the Knight News Challenge entry named Homicide Watch D.C. has a great idea to do more than that by  putting a focus on the victims instead of jut the crime. While such a database would be meaningful tot he community and become a valuable news resource, I think it would be tough to keep up in the long run.
  • Ethnic media’s four-step model for the news industry’s future – Ethnic press has a lot of evolutionary tendencies that could be taken to heart by more general interest new providers – honestly, what they suggest here should have been done all along.

End of year/2010 Stuff

The Twitter

  • Why Twitter Will Endure – David Carr explains the inherent usefulness of Twitter – and how because of its utility, he believes it will outlast its competitors once the novelty wears off.
  • The Use of Twitter by America’s Newspapers – A detailed analysis with lots of data on how newspapers use Twitter. While I’m still unclear as to how they determine a paper’s overall rank (does it evaluate all the paper’s accounts?), it is interesting to see which paper’s interact the most, as opposed to blasting out updates all of the time.

Recommended reading on saving journalism, new technology and social media

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On December 17, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models, Recommended Links

“New” Tools and Technology

  • Prior to its demise, Editor & Publisher had written about allegedly “new tools” the newspaper in Knoxville uses to police website comments. First of all, I find it alarming that anyone, particularly a publication supposedly in the know about our industry, would find this community management approach new or innovative. I say the system Knoxville has employed is a bare minimum for every site with comments. (For the record, my paper has had a nearly identical system for two years – and it isn’t even close to ideal.)
  • To their credit, E&P also talked to working journalists trying out Google Wave in the newsroom. Also features quotes from a familiar source (shameless plug!). I’d link to E&P directly, but they have a paywall that makes their news useless on the internet. I guess even a paywall on your site can’t save your business model, huh?
  • Econsultancy has created a helful look at search engine optimization for jounos. SEO is a strange and complicated business, but it’s worth knowing the basics if you want to get your content read by more than just your regular visitors. Everyone says the future (or, really, the present) lies in the power of search – so it’s good to know.

Social Media

  • Despite what some curmudgeonly types say, social media is definitely not just for kids. Recent demo studies say senior citizens are making huge inroads into social networks like Facebook and YouTube. I’m hearing all of the time how we need to keep hold of our senior readers by focusing more efforts into print, but maybe we as an industry just aren’t giving them enough credit in regards to the Internet.
  • Speaking of social media in the newsroom, Mashable thoughtfully put together The Journalist’s Guide to Maximizing Personal Social Media ROI. If you ever wondered why there’s a push to get into social media or what exactly you can get out of it, it’s worth a read. They have really good ideas for building a social media routine and establishing priorities for reporters and other news managers using social media in reporting/branding/aggregation.
  • If you aren’t very familiar with the mobile social network Foursquare, here’s something of a guide to get started. Foursquare has a lot of potential for journalists, mobile reporters in particular. I hope to write about this a bit more soon.

Saving Journalism

  • Robert Niles asks: What should the government do to help journalism? Niles really goes out on a limb to suggest that the government can help journalism not by funding it directly, but by changing the health care system and raising taxes on the wealthy. Sound crazy? Well, I don’t see your solutions anywhere.
  • In case you’ve been living under a technology rock, Apple’s making a tablet next year. Everyone’s been expecting it – and it very well could be the turning point in this particular realm of technology started by the likes of the Kindle and iPhone. For once, the journalism would would be wise to capitalize on what could be the beginnings of a new technology shift and we ready with tablet reader friendly news. No guarantees it’ll work out for Apple or for our industry, but it’s worth a shot.

Journalism and the Interwebs: A Reading Guide

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On December 11, 2009

In Recommended Links, Surviving

I read a lot of industry blogs and they generally all boil down to two topics: complaining about the Internet (or complaining about people complaining about the Internet) and lamenting the future of news.  It makes it all a little tough to keep up with what actual issues we’ve settled this year and what’s still out there to be figured out.

Thankfully, the Nieman Lab Blog took the time to assemble what dominated discussion regarding the future of news this year and takes a look at what will likely be hot topics next year as the industry continues to reel and (hopefully) evolve.  Most notably, next year seems to be heading in a direction of looking beyond the industry itself to what the affects the changes in the industry will (or should) have on journalism education, politics and public policy.

And in the second camp of journalism industry blog posts, Paul Bradshaw reviews all of the complaints news folks have had against The Internets over the years in one fell swoop. From hating on Google to opposing blogs and user-provided news, he offers something of a summation of just how depressing some news execs can be when it comes to that which they don’t understand.

In online news, only the presentation matters

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On December 11, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

It the industry may finally be learning from our companions in social media and aggregation. We’re starting to see that users want things to be simple, up-to-the-minute, all in one place and, by God, they aren’t going to just read whatever we say they should.

I’ve been working on a project with Gannett that tackles the next phase of our websites’ design to reflect a lot of these observations. I expect the same is happening at news companies all around the nation. I can only hope we all don’t continue to make the same mistakes in designing around the often conflicting interests in content and advertising.

The past couple of weeks have seen the roll out of a few new looks and ideas for online news presentation that really seem to focus on the observed needs and desires of readers, while not ignoring how much the online medium has to offer. These three presentations, in their own ways, seem to fit what we know users want…and quite notably, they dared to design them without ad positions.

NewsPulse

NewsPulse on CNN.com is a great visualization of the idea many of us have had for online presentation. It’s s simple, sortable stream of stories by media type, topic and various measures of popularity. It is essentially Digg without the Diggs and a lot cleaner interface.

Caveat: As a front page web news manager, I hope some measure of importance of news could be factored in as a filterable option, as many people who’d use this product might not otherwise see “important” headlines because they would not be popular or in a topic area they would tend to read. Of course, the user should probably visit another site if they want “important” news anyway (zing).

Living Stories

Living Stories, the new presentation experiment from Google, the NYT and WaPo is exactly what online news should be. I can’t get over how amazing this presentation is and how useful it can be for following a complex, long-term story or topic (like the health care reform).

A Living Story gathers all news updates, opinion, multimedia and conversation on an ongoing story in one place, at one URL. The format is best suited to help a reader see the latest developments in a story, with a timeline of events, important documents and user comments in an easy-to-digest fashion. What I like best about it that it is customizable, cookied for returning visitors to pick up where they left off and easy to follow offsite via RSS and email alerts.

Best of all, if this project works out for all parties involved, Google will make this available to other sites. It’d be a huge improvement in what’s currently available on most news sites, including that of the WaPo and the Times. You can read more about the living story from Paul Bradshaw, who is similarly dazzled.

Real-Time Search

You might not consider it a news presentation, but Google’s real-time search is a perfect format for breaking news. It builds on Google’s already formidable search presence with live news updates on a searched topic from news sites and Twitter (with more to come). It isn’t exactly made for news, but it should be. Maybe if we spent more time working with Google as opposed to trying to fight them, we could get something really great out of a product like this.
We at Cincinnati.Com used Google’s real-time search to supplement our coverage of University of Cincinnati football coach Brian Kelly’s departure for Notre Dame.  It’s an improvement over Twitter search (which we’d usually use) in a lot of ways because it allows you to see the latest news on the topic from blogs and news sites. I do wish that, like Twitter search, it allowed you to customize a geographic range…but that can always come later.

Recommended links: Freemium models, ideas and more

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On November 30, 2009

In Online Revenue Models, Recommended Links

Oh, Rupert

News Corp’s Murdoch says he’ll hide his content from Google very soon. I’ll believe it when I see it. And if he does do it, how long will it take for regret to set in?

Pay Models

Alan Mutter points to the indicators and recent comments from newspaper execs that all point to a continuation of free news online at most outlets. A few places are going freemium, most notably the Star Tribune, who is mimicking the success of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with a premium sports service. The discussion in the comments is good too.

More on “freemium” content at the SF Chronicle and BusinessWeek.

Social Media

STATS: Has Twitter Flatlined Just Short of Mainstream? – For a long time, Twitter was gorwing exponentially, as was Facebook. But then Twitter evened out and Facebook just kept going. What happened?

Facebook Ads Now Let You Target Friends of Your Fans – Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections” targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.

How Twitter is Changing the Face of Media – Nothing new here, but it is a nice little overview of how far the news industry has come in using Twitter. Mashable also has a shoutout for social media’s effects on local news.
Mashable has 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases for those who still aren’t sure what to do with those invites.

Speaking of Wave experiments, RedEye has ventured onto Wave. As much as I applaud experimentation with news technology, I really have to question RedEye on this approach. It’s like advertising that you’re having a party, but only a few of your readers will actually be able to go. They seem to forget Wave’s still in preview mode and not everyone has an invite.

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