Guardian material on paidContent:UK

As a result of Guardian News & Media’s acquisition of ContentNext, Media Guardian content has started to appear on paidContent:UK. Just recently the same occured vice versa: the appearance of Paid Content articles on the Media Guardian site.

In July, Journalism.co.uk reported that Guardian News & Media had bought ContentNext, behind paidcontent.org, paidContent:UK and the Indian news site contentSutra.com.

An early report by the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD column reported that according to sources it was a figure ‘north of $30 million.’

The deal marked a ’significant expansion’ of GNM’s US presence, a press statement said at the time.

links for 2008-06-26

• Why Media Gets Community Wrong - One Man and His Blog
  “most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”
  (tags: blogging)
• Lost Remote » Local business video spending to skyrocket
  “A study by The Kelsey Group predicts that small and medium-sized businesses in local markets will increase their video spending from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012.”
  (tags: ads video)
• Sky News Blogs - Editors Blog
  “Welcome to the new-look home of Sky News online. I hope you will find it useful, informative, entertaining, and an improvement on its predecessor.”
  (tags: skynews revamp)
• Associated Press Begins Member Choice Pricing Rollout
  The Associated Press will begin rolling out details of its new pricing to members this week, a plan that will return up to $21 million to its U.S. member newspapers.
  (tags: ap newspapers usa)
• Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching
  As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap
  (tags: blogging ap journalism copyright)
• SacredFacts: State of Journalism
  Alan Rusbridger ruminates at the Frontline Club, pressed by Stephen Sackur, on the changing face of news and the problems of going 24/7:
  (tags: video guardian rusbridger)
• Inside Facebook » Facebook Launching Mini-Feed Comments Today (Updated Screenshot)
  Facebook has confirmed that it will launch in-line Mini Feed comments later today.
  (tags: facebook)
• Semantic Journalism: Ideas | Online Journalism Blog
  Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends.
  (tags: journalism web newspapers)

Spot.us: the ‘crowdfunded’ journalism site

How to find the funds to keep your site running is the needle in the haystack for most citizen journalism start-ups.

Speaking after the closure of his own citizen journalism project, Scribblesheet, founder John Ndege wrote on Journalism.co.uk:

“Here lies a major problem for citizen journalism start-ups. It’s difficult to add value on top of news unless you have an attractive website that really connects with the wider web. However, as time passes even that is not going to save your site.”

Not wanting to be all doom and gloom, Ndege said the idea of networked journalism could forge a brighter future for citizen news with a collaboration between the amateur and the professional.

Enter: Spot.us – a community news site financed by ‘crowdfunding’.

The site, which is the brainchild of David Cohn, proposes to keep the finances on a even keel using this model.

But how will it work? The site explains:

1. An individual or journalist creates a pitch that outlines an untold story in a local community.
2. Members of your community vote, with their money, on what stories are most important to them.
3. A journalist researches the facts and puts together an article. Editors provide check-and-balance on the story.
4. Spot.us publishes the story in its news feeds and works with local media outlets to have the articles published more widely.

The site is yet to go live and the model yet to prove itself, but it was enough to convince judges at the Knight News Challenge to award the project a grant for $340,000 in its latest round of funding.

“It’s unknown whether people will be willing to put 10-25$ down for journalism. I think they will if the pitch is right. So - in the beginning I’m just going to focus on getting a few good stories funded and published,” says Cohn in an interview with Innovation in College Media (ICM).

Cohn, who will initially focus the site on the San Francisco area, hopes Spot.us will also provide a platform for freelance journalists looking for projects.

In a blog post, Rick Burnes, says building a ‘critical mass of funders’ is the main challenge facing the site and suggests that putting an upper limit on donations, as successful projects will then require wider backing from the audience and says there should be no upper limit to contributions.

“Why put limits on how much one person can contribute? By doing so, you raise the bar for success. It means you have to get a lot more active funders on the site before you start paying journalists.”

To my mind an upper limit would also prevent projects being skewed by contributors, who could potentially stand to gain from a pitch being pursued.

However, as Cohn says in his comments on Burnes’ post, Spot.us should not become a tool for ‘axe grinding’ between journalists and subjects:

“I want to make the site such that - it will be empowering for an individual who otherwise wouldn’t be able to hire a journalist - but would be a hassle for somebody who has a spare 5k to spend on a journalist. Spot.Us works better and achieves more of its mission - if the person with 5k is only able to donate $400 and to make up for it - has to send an email to 10 of his/her rich friends. It’s to ensure that there really is an interest in this story from a group of people - so journalists don’t turn into errand boys writing press releases.”

I’ll be following Spot.us’ progress, in particular to see what type of content receives funding and how many contributors get behind the project.

Will residents of the San Francisco bay area feel compelled to ‘employ’ journalists to report on local issues? To me it depends what value they place on the role of the journalist and whether they will see more value in that investigation than any which they could conduct for free by themselves.

The value I suppose will be that this is not a private detective-style of journalism, but is intended to enable those who don’t have the time or funds to pursue local things that matter to them to invest in the newsgathering process.

Grants for New Voices projects and UCLAN lecturer Andy Dickinson

Hot on the heels of last week’s Knight News Challenge winners, two foundations have released details of journalism projects to receive funding.

New Voices - a project from the University of Maryland’s interactive journalism institute - has awarded funding of $17,000 each to 10 citizen media start-ups.

The recipients include: Cool State Online, a Californian project to set up micro bureaux covering news from the Asian and Latino communities; The Appalachian Independent, an online newspaper for the rural community in Maryland; and Family Life Behind Bars, a site where the families of prisoners can share information and experiences.

The progress of the winners (listed in full in a press release) can be viewed on the New Voices website.

Meanwhile, University of Central Lancashire journalism lecturer Andy Dickinson is to receive funding from journalism lab Sandbox for a project mapping the movements of local reporters in their communities.

Reporters from print, radio and TV would be equipped with GPS devices to monitor their movements on a normal working day, explains Dickinson in a blog post.

“The project would then attempt to develop a matrix that visually demonstrated when and where the news agendas of local communities and those of professional media organizations coincide, with a view to examining the range of elements that lead to this juxtaposition.

 

Conducted in this way the research can explore ‘randomness’, and ‘proximity’ to breaking news as a value that impacts news agendas (and says something about reseources too).”

Congratulations to Andy - we’re already looking forward to the results.

Conde Nast buys Ars Technica blog

Conde Nast (CN) has bought up technology blog Ars Technica, TechCrunch reports, adding the site to its Wired Digital network.

A price for the acquisition has not been disclosed, but is likely to match the $25 million paid by CN for Wired.com in 2006, says the report.

Reuters: Murdoch’s online operation to miss ambitious targets

The stressed state of the US economy is causing advertising budgets to shrink - causing News Corp to miss its ambitious online revenue target of one billion dollars by ten per cent, Rupert Murdoch said yesterday.

Reuters reported that the media tycoon claimed Fox Interactive Media - which runs the online part of his US empire, including MySpace - will however have “well over” $1 billion in revenue in the 2009 financial year.

News.com: Twitter gets more money

CNET is reporting that Twitter last week took an additional $15 million or $20 million in funding last week.

A source told News.com about the extra money being made available to the company.

Last summer it took a first round funding of $5 million.

Digital Journal launches revenue sharing for its citizen journalists

Digital Journal has relaunched its citizen journalism site, which now includes a revenue sharing initiative for citizen journalists.

Regular contributors to the site can now qualify for a share of the ‘moneypot’ made up from advertising revenue and the site has reportedly already paid out $38,000 to citizen journalists.

The initiative applies to news stories, rather than blogs, journals, groups, photos or video, and is calculated on the number of news stories each citizen journalist uploads rather than purely on the popularity of individual posts.

Citizen journalists who would like to be paid for their contributions must first have their work approved by the Digital Journal board to ensure they ‘have a solid understanding of spelling and grammar, and can show an ability to find and research relevant news.’

The move distinguishes the social news site from competitors such as Newsvine and Norg as the first online community to share a portion of revenue, albeit to a small percentage of its total users.

Social Media Journalist: “Our future isn’t traditional online but in mobile media platforms,” Steve Smith, Spokesman-Review

Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Steve Smith from The Spokesman-Review, USA.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
I am the editor of The Spokesman-Review, a 90,000 circulation daily serving several counties in eastern Washington state and north Idaho.

As editor, I supervise all news and editorial operations, including our website, our other digital platforms and our radio operations.

I have a staff of 124 full-time employees in the newsroom and an annual budget of about $9 million. I have been here since July 2002.

Before coming here, I worked in a variety of roles at seven other newspapers in six different cities.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
I use YouTube daily because we post all of our multimedia on the site and also are capable of embedding YouTube videos on our blogs, including my blog, “News is a Conversation”.

I use MySpace and Facebook when hiring. We check the profiles/pages of prospective employees and actually have rejected applicants because of questionable behavior observed on their pages.

I also go into MySpace frequently to check on the pages devoted to our entertainment magazine, “7″.

In addition, I check several industry blogs daily. Several times a day, I check Romenesko, the must-read industry blog on the Poynter Institute for Media Studies site.

I do very little of this on my mobile, though I do use it for blog work, reading and posting.

I’m still somewhat of a troglodyte (no MySpace page of my own) so I don’t use the mobile to access video or social networking sites.

The Spokesman-Review is the pioneer newspaper (in the United States at least) for transparency. Our transparent newsroom initiative is built around interaction with people in our communities. Blogging and the various blogging tools are critical to us.

We also webcast news meetings and provide as much two-way interaction as possible via chats and other real-time opportunities. Increasingly, we’re developing transparency systems that work on mobile devices.

3. Of the thousands of social media tools available, could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or a news gathering tool?
Blogging from the field has the most potential for us at the moment. We’re in the process of developing ideas for 7 that would have real non-media people posting live reports from concerts, nightclubs and other events.

We’re also involved in some beta proposals for training citizen journalists and giving them publishing platforms.

I have no idea where all of this will lead. We’re experimenting with some developing Google applications such as Google Maps and Google Street View to see how they might enhance our blogs.

4. And the most overrated in your opinion?
Tough question. I am willing to try anything with any tool. Until something proves to be useless, I won’t dismiss it.

I do believe our future isn’t in traditional online but in mobile media platforms, the potential of which is yet to be understood. That may drive us to networking tools that enhance the mobile experience.

To reference one single overrated tool, as it were, I’d have to mention Wikipedia. There is an enormous amount of information there. I go to the site often for informal searches. But journalists beware. It is a bottomless quicksand pool that will easily send reporters and editors off in the wrong direction, at best wasting time and, at worst, producing factually inaccurate, even humiliating journalism.

Paid Content: Ning raises 60m dollars - worth 500m

Social network in a box, Ning, has raised 60m dollars in a fourth round of venture capital money from ‘unspecified institutional investors’ taking valuation of the company to 500m, according to Paid Content.

The company raised raised 44m last summer, which then valued the company at $170 million - says PC.