Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » San Francisco

LA Times: Spot.Us expands to Los Angeles

Judith Townend — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:27:51 +0000

Spot.us, the crowd-funded journalism venture that launched 10 months ago in San Francisco with funding from the Knight Foundation, has expanded to Southern California as its second market, the LA Times reported yesterday.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

NYTimes.com: N. Korea sentences American journalists to 12 years hard labour

Judith Townend — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:57:33 +0000

Two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, have been sentenced to 12 years of hard labour in North Korea ‘in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontation with the United States,’ the New York Times reports.

“Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were on a reporting assignment from Current TV, a San Francisco-based media company co-founded by Al Gore, the former vice president, when they were detained by the soldiers.”

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

Times Online: Time Out’s Elliott considers selling control to expand online

Laura Oliver — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:33:59 +0000

Tony Elliott, the proprietor of listings magazine Time Out, is considering selling control of the title to help fund online expansion.

“We want to develop in Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds and Manchester; in Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And we’d certainly not look to launch magazines in places like Paris or Los Angeles without a developed website in place first,” he told the Times.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

AdAge.com: ‘Digital bigger chunk of revenue than print’ for the Onion

Judith Townend — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:09:58 +0000

“Digital is becoming a bigger chunk of our revenue than print. Print is still very strong for us. Digital, it’s not much more than half, but it’s more than half,” Onlon President-CEO, Steve Hannah, told Ad Age, in the last question of a Q&A this week.

Hannah also denied rumours that the Onion’s weekly print edition is to be shut down, although Ad Age reports that the Onlon’s San Francisco and Los Angeles print editions have been closed.

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

Information Architects’ Ning network event sells out in ten minutes

Judith Townend — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:47:04 +0000

Communication via a Ning network led to tickets for a information architects’ (IA) mini-conference in London ‘selling’ out in just ten minutes.

Information architecture is ‘the emerging art and science of organising large-scale websites,’ increasingly important for media sites.

The Ning network created by Ken Beatson last year, has allowed the UK’s information architects to talk more freely and effectively than via the old mailing list system, Martin Belam, a member of the group and information architect for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

An event was set up, hosted for free at the Guardian’s offices and sponsored by Axure and Aquent, and after a bit of promotion via its Twitter account (@london_ia), 40 tickets were rapidly snapped up for the event which will take place on April 20. Another 10 will also be released at midday on Friday.

The event will see participants talk for 10-15 minute slots in an informal way.

Martin Belam told Journalism.co.uk that ‘the goal of good information architecture is that people understand information,’ so it suits them to share knowledge and skills in this way. London is one of the biggest centres for information architects, perhaps the biggest outside New York and San Francisco, he said.

An overlap between editorial and technological roles is increasingly important for newspapers, Belam added.

Belam hopes that the event could be rolled out three times a year, with the next one being held in September.

Also see: Q&A with Martin Belam here. Similar Posts:

News channel’s cit-j footage of Oakland shooting goes viral

Judith Townend — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:11:34 +0000

The video of the police shooting of Oscar Grant III in Oakland, California, has spread quickly over YouTube in the last week, greatly influencing the nature of the media reports. The most popular video is the clip that originally aired on news channel KTVU, a FOX affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area.

WashingtonPost.com reports:

“Handheld video-enabled cameras and cell phones at the ready, alert witnesses at the scene caught the shooting and the moments that preceded it from different angles.

“In one of their videos, an onlooker yells at a woman recording the scene: ‘Put it on YouTube!’

“Local and national television stations have aired and re-aired excepts from the raw and grainy videos, which have taken on a new life online.”

Imagine if such footage existed in cases such as the UK police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: how would reportage or subsequent events have been different? Would the UK media have used the footage in the same way?

Also – does film like this show that we have reached a point where video quality can be disregarded when it’s a strong news story?

Watch the YouTube video ‘Bart Police shooting in Oakland KTVU report‘ here:

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Feeds feast for FT: new corporate RSS and FriendFeed experiment

Laura Oliver — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:08:12 +0000

(Try saying that headline 10 times fast)

First up, the Financial Times has announced a new RSS service for corporate users – an add-on for those paying subscribers who signed up for the site’s direct licence system introduced in April last year.

The customisable RSS feed will be available to corporate customers, who under the licence arrangement are entitled unlimited access to FT content on FT.com and third-party services, and can be tailored by specific search terms, a press release from the title said.

Not full-fat feeds as yet – users will click through to read articles on the main website.

Elsewhere, technology journalists at the FT’s San Francisco bureau have been experimenting with FriendFeed to create a single source of their links, articles and blog posts (it can also be used for Twitter and Flickr updates):

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Gawker.com: Jobs go at social-blog network

Judith Townend — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:20:42 +0000

“LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian internet startup, has cut about 20 of 28 employees and offered them no severance,” Gawker reports.Similar Posts:

HuffingtonPost going local – and international?

Laura Oliver — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:21:27 +0000

Having secured $25 million of funding and launched its Chicago section in beta, the Huffington Post is reportedly eyeing further expansion with plans for San Francisco coverage.

The launch of a network of HuffPo local editions is still in the planning stage, however, the San Francisco Chronicle was told.

So it’s next stop San Fran, then – the world. The site’s international section is also in beta:

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WSJ online video training for reporters

Judith Townend — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:51:50 +0000

And another for your watching pleasure. This comes from Blip TV: a brief interview with the Wall Street Journal’s deputy managing editor Alan Murray, on the WSJ’s 25-30 videos a day, the majority of which are produced by the paper’s reporters.

Kelsey Blodget, associate producer writes:

“As part of a strategy to integrate online video with the reporting, The Journal trains reporters on a regular basis in New York and San Francisco to use Sony HDR-HC9 cameras.”

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Geo-what? Oh, it’s coming to the UK soon…

Judith Townend — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:07:42 +0000

This week saw the launch of a hyperlocal news map for the Liverpool Echo, as announced by Sly Bailey at the AOP Digital Publishing Summit (follow link for report in MediaGuardian).

It geotags news content so each user can search for news by postcode.

Nothing new there, web-savvy newshounds might think, but actually it is:

Though Archant announced plans for geotagged sites last October (it started with Jobs24 – a winner at yesterday’s NS ADM Awards – and Homes24 and has plans to roll out geotagged news content in 2008) to date we’re still waiting for the official launch of geotagged news.

Yesterday we reported that American site outside.in will be launching in the UK, which will link news with local areas (as localised as users specify). Outside.in thinks its opportunity has come about as a result of:

“The demand for personalized information on the web, and the failure of the newspaper industry to capitalize on featuring hyperlocal content” (Nina Grigoriev, outside.in)

Journalism.co.uk thought it was time for a bit of a run-down on the development of geotagging in the UK.

First, what is it?
Journalists record the locations referred to in each story and add their postcodes as metadata when uploading their copy to the web.

In that way, geotagged content allows users to prioritise the news they see online according to postcodes.

Where are we at in the UK?
The Liverpool Echo is the first site (of the large publishing groups) to do so in the UK. Although other sites have incorporated mapping into their sites, no other places has successfully incorporated news content as well.

The BBC plans to invest £68 million across its network of local sites, which will be decided upon by the BBC Trust in February 2009. Online Journalism Blog reported a sneak preview in January 2008, though the BBC have since asked us not to refer to the sites as ‘hyperlocal’.

Critics such as Trinity Mirror’s CEO, Sly Bailey, have voiced concerns over the BBC’s local video proposals, saying they will provide ‘unfair competition’ for the regional media.

Northcliffe is also developing geotagged content on its revamped thisis sites, and told Press Gazette in June the process has been difficult: “Because not all stories affect only one specific point, the company is finding geocoding challenging,” Hardie said.

According to the article: “The localisation functions will remain hidden until journalists have built up enough stories with postcode data.”

Back in July 2007 we saw reports of Sky geotagging its news, but it hasn’t developed at the same speed or as widely as in the US.

What’s happening in the US?
Everyblock is developing fast across the US. It’s a new experiment in journalism and data, offering feeds of local information and data for every city block in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, with more cities to come. Not in the UK yet, but watch this space.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post has used outside.in’s maps for their own site, while the New York Times’ Boston.com (the online Boston Globe) uses MetaCarta’s geographic search technology for maps.

So, what does this mean for UK based geotagging?
With the arrival of highly efficient US based sites such as outside.in (who said an UK based office is a possibility) maybe it’s time for Archant, Trinity Mirror and Northcliffe to get their skates on before it’s too late.

Please send us your examples of UK based geotagged content, from formal publications or otherwise, as we want to track it as it expands in the UK.

(Then we can make a geotagged feed and map of geotagging in journalism. Then our heads might explode)Similar Posts:

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

Kristine Lowe — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:43:10 +0000

Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.Similar Posts:

CNET: Facebook and Google still not ready to connect friends

Oliver Luft — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:22:54 +0000

Developers from Facebook and Google sitting on a panel at Supernova 2008 in San Francisco yesterday.

CNET has them saying that its the lawyers who are keeping them from using collaboartive technology for their respective friend-connecting APIs while the developers work on ways of sharing data between social networks.

Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect service last month saying it violated the site’s terms of service – the violation was redistributing user information from Facebook to other developers without the users’ knowledge.

What would Google have to do to not vialate the terms then?

Well, that one’s with the lawyers.Similar Posts:

Spot.us: the ‘crowdfunded’ journalism site

Laura Oliver — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:55:10 +0000

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:

An individual or journalist creates a pitch that outlines an untold story in a local community.
Members of your community vote, with their money, on what stories are most important to them.
A journalist researches the facts and puts together an article. Editors provide check-and-balance on the story.
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.Similar Posts:

Twitter service soars to new heights in Japan

ruth morgan — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:24:08 +0000

Last week’s launch of Twitter in Japan is showing early signs of success, reports ReadWriteWeb.

The new version was born when it was noticed that a significant percentage of Twitter usage was originating from Japan, despite the service being in English.

Now the dedicated Japanese version has been launched many sites are predicting an explosion of Twitter in the country.

Twitterlocal shows that Tokyo already has the highest usage of any city – almost three-times higher than second place location San Francisco.

Google Trends supports Twitterlocal statistics, as its stats show: Japan as the region with the highest overall usage, Japanese cities make up the top three globally and the Japanese language is the most prevalent across the service.

An interesting difference in the new version was the inclusion of ‘some commercial experimentation’ by Twitter. The Japanese service carries advertising media from two clients. The move has been interpreted by many of a sign of things to come for the rest of the service.Similar Posts: