Innovations in Journalism - MediaGeeks

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. So how about a search engine for the media? Welcome Mediageeks.org.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Howard Owens, I’ve been doing online media for 13 years and am a bit of a geek about it.

When I first started thinking about launching a site like [the journalism social network] WiredJournalists.com, I registered the domain MediaGeeks.org. I wanted to create a social network for media geeks just like me.

When Ryan Sholin and Zac Echola and I started talking about the concept that became WiredJournalists.com, they weren’t so sold on “media geeks,” so I had this domain sitting around … and I had been wanting to play with building niche/vertical search engines with Google. I launched my first vertical search engine for RVClub.com in 1998 (with the help of now defunct WaveShift), so this is a concept of long-standing interest.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Because it allows you to have a search filtered to just media/journalistic topics. Let’s say you’re curious about what media people say about coverage of Paris Hilton … well, a general Google search for ‘Paris Hilton and media’ won’t be fruitful, because of the gazzillion of non-media hits.This search filters out all the non-media sites, so you can get right to the heart of what media publications and media bloggers might be saying about PH and coverage of her.

That’s just an example, but it should point the way to how you can leverage a more filtered search of just media-related sites.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
It probably won’t get any more attention, except for adding more media sites as they came along. Google has upgraded the API for the Business Edition of its search product, but not the free version. I’m not sure I’ll have time to do any fancy programming to improve the search engine should those upgrades become available to the free version.

4) Why are you doing this?
Because I thought it would be useful to me (and it has been, though not as useful a I had hoped because even Google search doesn’t always work as well as it should), so I hoped it would be useful to others. Not many people use it, though - I’m not sure if that’s because it’s a bad idea, or a lack of publicity.

I suppose you could argue in a networked world, if it were a good idea, it would have caught on by now. But it’s free to me, essentially, so right now I see no reason to take it down. Maybe it will catch on yet.

5) What does it cost to use it?
It’s free.

6) How will you make it pay?
I don’t need to make it pay, but I would love it if people started using it and some of those Google ads got clicked on once in a while (all out of legitimate interest in the advertiser’s message, of course), and I got to make a little extra money each month. That would be great, but not required.

There is an aspect, too, of giving back to the community, which isn’t something you hear online journalists talk about much these days, but used to be a big concept of being a Netizen a decade ago or so. So, even while the site hasn’t caught on, it is at some level an attempt to give back for all the goodness I get from the web and the online media community.

Tags: filtered search, google, Howard Owens, media bloggers, media geeks, niche/vertical search engines, online journalists, search engine, search product

Innovations in Journalism - Newsvetter - taking the pain out of press releases

In our Innovations in Journalism series we give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are developing.

Today’s candidate is Newsvetter - a site that wants to build better connections between journalists and PRs, starting with more targeted press releases.

Founder Andrew Fowler tells us more:

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m a former PR practitioner who worked in the profession for about eight years. I cut my teeth at a big PR agency and then after a couple of years started consulting for smaller companies and organizations as a solo practitioner.

I have spent the bulk of my career pitching ‘news’ to journalists - a core PR function that now more than ever is being equated with spam.

Why is this happening? Quality has given way to quantity. With the aid of press release distribution services and social networks, journalists are receiving record numbers of poor quality and irrelevant material from PR people.

In November 2007, I launched the online news vetting and delivery service Newsvetter. Based in Portland, Oregon USA, Newsvetter is designed to discourage mass pitching and help journalists extract higher quality information from companies and PR agencies.

Instead of sending press releases and cut-and-paste pitches, PR people go through a vetting Q&A process on the site made up of key questions commonly asked by journalists. Follow this link for an example of a completed Q&A.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
The vetting process provides answers to key questions which then allows journalists to quickly evaluate a story idea’s potential and verify its accuracy. Journalists can also register, create a public profile on the site which allows them to provide details about their beat, publication, current interests, recent stories, and when and how they like to get contacted. Journalists can share their profile URL with the PR people they work with. To see an example profile of a journalist on Newsvetter use this link.

After viewing a journalist’s profile, PR people email them news ideas, but only after they complete the vetting process.

To encourage quality, journalists can rate and comment on the work submitted by PR people. Comments and ratings become part of a PR person’s public record on Newsvetter (one that can be viewed by journalists, peers, employer, client etc.). One goal of mine is to create a system similar to eBay’s “feedback score” for sellers which will reward those who submit quality story ideas.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
The site is currently in beta. Under development are some changes to the user interface, which will make the site easier to understand and use, as well as some features that will make the service more attractive for PR people.

4) Why are you doing this?
I’m hearing loud and clear from journalists that the quality of news pitches to them is substandard (and largely irrelevant). Rather than talk (more) about it, I’ve created a working tool that addresses this issue head on.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Newsvetter will always be a free service for journalists. It is also currently free to PR people. In the coming months, Newsvetter will offer a set of premium features, which companies and PR agencies can pay to access.

6) How will you make it pay?
The pay-off is that journalists associate Newsvetter with quality and will thoughtfully review PR submissions that come through the site (rather than simply delete them ). PR people will see Newsvetter as a service that can help build relationships with journalists and increase quality coverage for their company or client.

Tags: Andrew Fowler, online news vetting, PR, press release distribution services, social networks

Innovations in Journalism – socially referred and aggregated news from Yahoo! Buzz

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on.

You’ll know and use Digg and the geeks will be into Reddit - loving it now its gone open source - but there is another one worth looking at, and it’s a biggie. Welcome to IIJ, Yahoo! Buzz.

1. Who are you and what’s it all about
My name is Tapan Bhat and I am senior VP of Yahoo! Front Doors and Network Services.

Yahoo! Buzz beta is an extension to Yahoo.com that unites people with the most remarkable content from websites across the internet and brings the most “buzz-worthy” stories to the Yahoo! homepage.

It determines the most popular, must-read stories and videos from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the web, with an approach that combines user votes with search popularity to determine a story’s Buzz ranking.

2. Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Yahoo! Buzz can be useful to journalists on multiple levels. It can provide increased exposure for your great content. The most popular stories also may be selected by our editorial team and featured on Yahoo.com.

In addition, Yahoo! Buzz offers valuable insight for anyone interested in what is buzzing about and looking for timely story ideas or resources.

3. Is this it or is there more to come?
After only three month in beta, Yahoo! Buzz receives around 8 million unique monthly visitors worldwide according to comScore.

We’ll continue to listen to the feedback from publishers and our users to make sure the site continues to find the most relevant and interesting content online.

Since launching with around 100 large and small publishers, we have gradually been adding new publishers to the beta program and now have around 300 publishers participating.

In the coming months, we’ll continue adding more participants and once Yahoo! Buzz is generally available any publisher will be able to participate.

Looking ahead, Yahoo! Buzz will form the basis for an open ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and consumers.  We’ll develop this ecosystem by building out unique new syndication and monetisation tools that help publishers share relevant content, connect to more advertisers and reach a broader audience. Over time, we expect this to extend into a powerful content exchange that connects owners of content with distributors of traffic.

4. Why are you doing this?
While the homepage has always featured engaging stories and content, our editors could only scratch the surface before. With Buzz we can add more depth to the front page by bubbling up the best content from around the web, as indicated by users.

In addition, it creates a comprehensive, categorised database of content from across the web that can eventually make the Yahoo! network better.

5. What does it cost to use it?
Yahoo! Buzz is entirely free to use.

6. How will you make it pay?
As mentioned earlier, our primary goal is to further Yahoo!’s leadership position as the best starting point on the web and offering more relevant content brings people coming back to Yahoo! again and again.

During the beta process for Yahoo! Buzz, we will also be finalising our monetisation approach, including ways in which we may give prominent promotion to content from Yahoo! partners when appropriate.

Tags: monetisation tools, search popularity, Tapan Bhat, Yahoo

Innovations in Journalism - Zemanta will find the online context of your article

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. In the spotlight this week is Slovenian start-up Zemanta.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
We are a young start-up from Slovenia, building a global tool to help online authors with their writing process.

Our product recognises what they are writing about through semantical analysis and as they are writing starts to suggest related pictures, links and articles they can include in their post to make it richer and more appealing.

It currently works for all major blogging platforms, but we envision providers of content management systems and publishers using our service as well.

Click here to see how Zemanta works with Wordpress.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
To publish content online today means: after you write your story, you still need to add links and images, and tag it properly.

Your readers expect rich content, next generation semantic web applications require it, and we want to make it simple and fun to produce this high quality web content.

Our service utilises the power of advanced machine-learning and natural language processing algorithms, so that you don’t have to do repetitive tasks and can just be creative.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We will be adding a lot of new releases, such as personalization of suggestions, linking to own old posts and tools for additional media formats. [Since this interview Zemanta has added a reblogging function allowing bloggers to quote from others' sites with correct attribution]

4) Why are you doing this?
We want to solve the problem authors are facing trying to create interesting online content that their readers will appreciate. It is becoming increasingly hard to produce rich, web articles as the amount of content available is rising.

5) What does it cost to use it?
It’s free for non-commercial use and for a reasonable amount of requests per day. We will keep it free for bloggers.

6) How will you make it pay?
We will be suggesting affiliate links and earning commission on them. We will also offer our extended API for commercial applications.

Tags: API, content management, content management systems, content online today, media formats, natural language processing algorithms, online authors, online context, posts and tools, semantic web applications, Slovenia, web articles, web content, young start-up

Innovations in Journalism - PRs, sources - time to Help A Reporter Out

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Showing us its wares today is the aptly named HelpAReporter.com - set-up by Peter Shankman.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
HelpAReporter was designed simply to help journalists find the sources they need without a lot of hassle. I started the site for two simple reasons:

a) I think that other services are more about making money and less about actually getting reporters what they need. “I need someone who understands 18th century art” turns into 600 emails that say “I once saw a piece of 18th century art as I WAS WRITING MY BOOK ON HOW TO SELL THINGS ON THE INTERNET DO YOU WANT A COPY TO REVIEW?!”

b) I think that in the end, reporters don’t WANT to hate publicists, and publicists don’t WANT to come across as idiots. I’d like to help prove that.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Journalists start every single day behind the eight-ball. They need sources. Sadly, most publicists send emails that do nothing more than waste their time. I’m trying to change that – journalists simply submit their queries at www.helpareporter.com/press, and it goes out to my list - now over 10,000 sources big. They can put in their email or go anonymously if they choose.

I make all my sources promise to stay on topic, and not waste a journalist’s time. So far, they’re all agreeing! That rocks.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
I never say never – I didn’t expect this to be any bigger than the original Facebook group I started. Now, 10k members and growing? Who knows how big it’ll go?

4) Why are you doing this?
Here’s why… The site takes probably 15 minutes a day to administer. I simply take the emails, put them into a text document, at a few times a day, send them out through the email distribution list.

Too many people (in this industry and well as in the world) simply live on a ‘ME, ME, ME’ mentality. Why not do something good for others? I’ve been very fortunate - The companies I’ve started have all done very well. Why shouldn’t I give something back to account for all that luck? The fact that more people don’t think like that kinda saddens me - but on the plus side, it means that I can shine without doing that much extra. So it’s a nice balance.

5) What does it cost to use it?
The site is 100% free for both journalists and sources.

6) How will you make it pay?
Right now, I don’t need to. Perhaps I will one day? A text ad? Who knows. Right now, if people really like it, I invite them to donate to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in California. Perhaps one day I’ll sell it, or start some small advertising on it. For now, it’s totally not necessary.

Tags: Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, California, INTERNET DO YOU WANT, Peter Shankman, www.helpareporter.com/press

Innovations in Journalism - one-click image uploading from Skitch.com

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today’s candidate is Skitch.com - an easy way to upload your images.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Mark Pearson and I work for plasq - a company of about 10 people spread around the globe.

We work to make fun, intuitive and expressive software, and are best known for “Comic Life”, an application which makes it easy to turn your digital photos into photo comics.

We’ve now developed Skitch and Skitch.com:

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Skitch makes the screen grabbing process enjoyable and very fast.

Journalists involved in the tech industry often need to take many screenshots. Skitch supports many common formats including TIFF, which publishers often need for magazines. If the journalist produces content for online use, jpg and png are available too.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are just getting started! We recently released two new features to allow you to email images to Skitch.com as well as send images hosted on Skitch.com to twitter.

Combine these two features and you can send images from your camera phone to Skitch.com then automatically have them appear on twitter.

4) Why are you doing this?
To improve and speed up sharing images with others.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Currently while in beta, it is free.

6) How will you make it pay?
We haven’t announced our pricing yet.

Tags: intuitive and expressive software, online use

News prediction game Hubdub launches widgets

Hubdub - the gaming website where you bet Hubdub dollars on the outcome of news events - has developed two widgets, according to the site’s official blog.

The market widget features a graph, which shows how different outcomes have been backed by users over time and what their changing probability is.

The prediction widget on the other hand lets users record their own predictions - and how much they bet - ‘for posterity’. To get this widget, users will be given a link as they post a question.

Earlier this year Journalism.co.uk interviewed Hubdub founder Nigel Eccles, who spoke of a revenue strategy that will involve partnerships with media organisations and publishers. Offering widgets is a great way to start this sharing of content and - with added trackbacks - of driving traffic back to the Hubdub site.

Tags: Hubdub, Journalism.co.uk, media organisations, Nigel Eccles

Innovations in Journalism - share your links. Wait, isn’t that Del.icio.us? No, it’s more social - it’s Mento

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. This week’s ticket comes via Mento - sharing links, real social like.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi, I’m Gregor Hochmut. Mento is a platform for sharing links with the people around you. They could be co-workers, family, thought leaders you look up to - or simply friends who send you a humorous video every now and then.

Del.ici.ous and other bookmarking platforms have mostly focused on “saving” links for private use.

Mento, however, wants to focus on the communication and conversation that takes place - beyond the limited usefulness of email and instant messaging - when you share a link.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
In its current version, Mento is most useful as a collaboration tool for journalists. A group of could join together and put links about a shared topic in a common channel. Links in the channel would be visible to the team.

They could comment on each other and have a permanent, searchable archive for their links.

In addition, Mento is a simple communication tool for sending recommendations to people, its careful not to overwhelm with email so you get just one a day with all the links - or you can subscribe by RSS.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Journalists and publishers will be interested in the next expansion of the service. We intend to offer an easy publishing tool where you can create a branded, editorial link channel and publish it.

Imagine an RSS feed of relevant links that your editorial staff gathers on a daily, weekly or monthly basis - but the feed would be a public website (fully co-branded) that’s designed for regular web users who can easily subscribe to your link selection by email and other convenient means.

4) Why are you doing this?
There is more and more noise in our information environment every day and it’s getting harder and harder to filter the meaningful signals.

We’re on a mission to make your daily information streams more manageable and more meaningful.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Mento is free and always will be for the end-user.

6) How will you make it pay?
Along the lines of the branded editorial channels mentioned above, we will consider the economics of offering a professional link publishing service - but we have not finalized the business model for it so far.

In the meantime, we have had surprisingly good results with Google’s contextual AdSense program on the current Mento site since the advertisements are targeted based on the links that the user sends and receives.

Tags: collaboration tool, communication tool, Delaware, easy publishing tool, google, instant messaging, regular web users

Innovations in Journalism - tracking conversations and researching stories with YackTrack

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. This week’s starter for ten is the aptly named YackTrack, designed to find info related to a single issue across various sites.

1) who are you and what’s it all about?
YackTrack is a service written by Rob Diana that allows a user to enter the URL of an article or blog post they want to find conversations about.

The conversations can be occurring on blogs (WordPress only so far), Digg, Mixx, Technorati (in the form of “blog reactions”), Disqus, StumbleUpon (in the form of “reviews”) and FriendFeed.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Based on the feedback I am receiving it seems to be useful to almost anyone. For a journalist, you can pick up a story from another site and run it through YackTrack, then get the all comments [made about the story] from other sites.

Most important in that list are the links you can get from services like Technorati. Those links are really just other articles or
blog posts talking about the same topic. If the topic if popular enough, you can grab several URLs from a service like TechMeme and run all of them through YackTrack and you could get a really good list of researchable articles.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Yes there is more to come. Some things I cannot really talk about yet (as there has to be some suspense) and others are fairly straightforward.

Registration and saving of URLs to track are a logical step forward. RSS and email notifications are also a popular request. More service support is necessary as well. I have also had requests for blog plugins, specifically WordPress.

4) Why are you doing this?
A few weeks ago, there were a number of blog posts on where comments were being posted and whether the fragmented conversation was a good thing.

I think the fragmentation leads to more thought provoking conversations, but many bloggers do not know that their post was submitted to Mixx, Digg or StumbleUpon. Given that different sites have different cultures I thought it would be really interesting to have all of the conversations visible in one spot. I am getting the feeling that other people feel the same way.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Right now it does not cost anything to use. The service is simple to use and I would like to keep it available in that way.

6) How will you make it pay?
I would like the service to pay for its own hosting, but I do not really want to charge the users. I do have Google AdSense on the site now, but that is more to see if there is any minimal revenue available.

I am going to be looking at direct advertising as a revenue stream as well, as that could cover the hosting fees as well.

Tags: direct advertising, google, Rob Diana

Innovations in Journalism: Flock’s social web browser

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, it’s the evolution of the browser with social browsing software from Flock.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi I’m Evan Hamilton, community ambassador for Flock.

Flock is a software company that is building a unique, social browser off of the technology that powers the Mozilla Firefox.

It takes browsing to the next level by integrating a number of social networking and media services.

While you can still surf the web normally we also bring in updates. Photos and videos from your friends show up in the media bar at the top of the browser, your friends appear and update within the people sidebar, and myworld collects all your online information (feeds, favorites, media and friend updates) in one place.

Additionally, we make sharing great online content easier by allowing you to drag and drop photos, text, and links from any website (or your media bar) to friends in the people sidebar, web-mail, blog posts, and comments.

Flock will automatically embed or link to this content. It also integrates with services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Gmail.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Journalists spend most of their time collecting research and then compiling it into stories. Flock makes it incredibly easy to have the latest news at your fingertips for consumption and collection.

Its feed reader will pull in updates from whichever websites you wish (assuming they have an RSS feed set up).

Found a piece of content you want to file away for a later story? Flock comes with a “web clipboard” to which you can add photos, videos, text and links to use later. Grab whatever you find compelling on a page and drop it into a folder for the article you’re working on, then access it later.

It’s all contained within the sidebar, not on your hard drive, so you can collect whatever you need before posting your blog or using it in your article.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There’s much more to come. Flock 1.2 will be coming out shortly, which introduces more integrated services.

Later in the year, Flock will be updating to the codebase powering the yet-to-be-released Firefox3. Beyond that, Flock has many plans to innovatively improve upon your web browsing experience.

4) Why are you doing this?
The web has dramatically evolved in the last few years, but the web browser has not. Web pages are no longer the only destination on the web; now we have photo and video objects, friends, and pieces of information.

Traditional web browsers require you to view this content within the context of a web page, but Flock provides a unique view of this content that makes it easier and faster to consume and share the things you love.

We felt that nobody else was stepping up to really support the next generation of the web, and so we decided to build on the fundamentally sound Firefox technology and build a browser that supported our activities on the new web.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Totally, 100 per cent free. Flock does not and will not cost you any money.

6) How will you make it pay?
It makes money the way all web browsers do: through the search box. Flock has a deal with Yahoo! in which any search that leads to a user clicking a sponsored link generates revenue.

This is unobtrusive and established, and is only the first of many opportunities for Flock to share revenue with partners.

Tags: fundamentally sound Firefox technology, Hamilton, integrated services, media bar, media services, online information, search box, social browsing software, social networking, social web browser, software, web browser, web browsers, web browsing experience, web clipboard, Yahoo, YouTube