Category Archives: Editors’ pick

Digital Trends: LinkedIn launches aggregated news service

A post on Digital Trends website reports that LinkedIn has launched a news aggregation service as a way of increasing the length of time people spend on the site.

Think about it: How much time do you actually spend in LinkedIn.com? Unless you’re fine-tuning your profile or searching for potential employees, the answer is probably not a lot. Most of us are content to let our accounts sit there until we can post an addition to our resume. Of course LinkedIn knows this, which is why it’s launching LinkedIn Today.

Full post on Digital Trends at this link

Nieman: Lessons of the Like Log

Nieman Journalism Lab has the results of a fascinating study into the news stories which gather the most ‘likes’ on Facebook. The study looked at 100,000 stories across 45 large news sites, including the New York Times, the Guardian, paidContent and Poynter.

It found that, of the top 40 most-liked stories of the past three months, many are related to “lifestyle, photo galleries, interactives, humor and odd news.”

Four of the articles in the top 40 are about “actual political news”; three are about celebrities.

The Like Log’s findings? In terms of overall popularity (total likes), The New York Times is “the leader of social engagement,” with some 2.3 million likes per month, 400 likes for a median story, and 13 articles in the top 40 most-liked overall. In terms of individual stories, the Wall Street Journal’s excerpt of Amy Chua’s (in)famous Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother — Journal headline: “Why Chinese Moms Are Superior” — comes out on top, with 340,000 likes.

Full report on Nieman Journalism Lab at this link

Techdirt: New York Times lawyers shut down former staffer’s Tumblr

Techdirt has laid into the New York Times for sending its laywers to shut down a Tumblr blog belonging to former staffer Jonathan Paul. Paul was using the account to repost some of the NYT’s “beautiful and unexpected imagery”, with links.

Paul notes that the blog actually had a decent following within the NYT, and his former colleagues had encouraged the project and helped promote it as well, fully realizing that it was helping their own work get more attention and driving more traffic to the NYT. And then the lawyers stepped in.

Full post on Techdirt at this link

Bloomberg: US publisher Gannett trialing paid-content model

US publisher Gannett (which is parent company to Newsquest in the UK) is trying out a paid-content model at three of its newspaper websites while it considers a broader online payment model, Bloomberg reported this week.

Chief executive officer Craig Dubow told Bloomberg that Gannett is likely to experiment more before making a decision about the broad use of paywalls.

Gannett’s newspaper in Greenville, South Carolina, has started charging readers $7.95 a year to access content devoted to Clemson University sports. Those subscribers view 40 to 70 pages per visit, compared with 6 to 8 pages on Gannett’s free websites, according to the McLean, Virginia-based company.

Read the full Bloomberg report here…

Mediabistro: The best/worst selling magazine covers of 2010

Mediabistro has been taking a look into the best and worst selling magazine covers in the US last year. For Time magazine the best selling cover was of Mark Zuckerburg, for New York magazine it was about the best place to live in New York. Mediabistro blog Fishbowl NY has pictures of the best selling covers.

Reuters aims to ‘cut through the clutter’ with new specialised news products

Reuters announced via a press release yesterday that it is launching a suite of news products aimed at professionals in the legal, tax and accounting and science markets, which the international news agency claims will “cut through the clutter” in online news.

Combining the world-class journalism of Reuters with the analysis and rich content available through products like Westlaw and Checkpoint, these offerings bring to customers unmatched insight into the topics shaping their profession, and the context to make the right decisions for their business.

According to the release, Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief of Reuters News, is to lead the “build-out of news teams” to cover topics such as litigation, tax policy and intellectual property law.

Also in Reuters news, this week paidContent reports that the agency is to distribute celebrity news video from Hollywood.TV as part of a new deal.

Reuters will distribute Hollywood.TV’s celebrity news footage as a complement to its existing mix of entertainment coverage. The deal further enhances the Reuters America’s recently launched “unified content platform”.

BBC CoJo: What’s the difference between curation and journalism?

BBC College of Journalism discusses a lively Twitter debate which took place at the weekend between Sky journalist Neal Mann and NPR’s social media strategist Andy Carvin. The blog attempts to move the debate on, looking at how journalism is changing as a result of social media.

On Friday, ‘mainstream’ media made a bad mistake when it ran images of fighting in the Libyan town of Zawiyah – Reuters picked up the video from social media, which claimed/believed it was legitimate ‘today’ footage. Other news organisations then picked up the material and rebroadcast it until they discovered it was from fighting in exactly the same location but from the previous week.

Was that a failure of mainstream media or social media? It was certainly a failure of journalism – and that’s the point: the differing strands of journalism and/or media are converging.

Full post on the BBC blog at this link

New York Times: Not doing any paywall coverage in its own back yard

A comment by the public editor of the New York Times points out how little coverage the newspaper has given to its plans to start charging for access to its website.

… The Times has published multiple stories in the past year on the introduction of an Internet paywall by Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London. It also covered in-depth the seamy controversy engulfing another Murdoch property in Britain, News of the World, as it contended with charges of unlawfully hacking into celebrities’ cellphone messages.

Of the Times’s own pay model for its Web site, though, all that has trickled into print is an initial story 14 months ago announcing that the plan would be carried out in a year, plus occasional subsequent references to the looming event. No significant story has been published — at least not as of my Friday evening deadline for this column.

Full post on the NYT at this link.

Wired: Al Jazeera English to launch social networking talk show

Al Jazeera English will soon be launching a new television show called The Stream which will closely integrate online communities and the news by harnessing social networking in both the sourcing and reporting of stories, according to a report from Wired.

During the course of the show, they’ll read tweets and updates (and display them on-screen) as they come up. They’re also planning on interviewing guests via Skype — connection quality issues be damned. In a screen test we saw at the Wired offices recently, the hosts bantered with each other and with in-studio guests, but also responded to viewers’ @ replies, played YouTube videos, and Skyped with social media mavens around the world. The studio was liberally sprinkled with monitors, and the show frequently cut to fullscreen tweets while the hosts read the 140-character updates out loud, hash tags and all.

According to this Twitter account, The Stream, understood to be due for launch in May, will be “a web community and daily television show powered by social media and citizen journalism”.

Outlining the plan on Facebook AJEstream says it will initially cover about five stories a day, based on the work of journalists and producers trawling the web and also by using an element of crowdsourcing opinion online on what topics interest people the most.

See The Stream’s website at this link.

MediaGuardian: Rupert Murdoch at 80

The Media Guardian has gone to town today ahead of Rupert Murdoch’s 80th birthday this Friday. What with the phone-hacking scandal, Times paywall, and the BSkyB bid, the “press baron who dared to look to the skies”, as Roy Greenslade calls him, is still making headlines 15 years after News International’s infamous Wapping move and almost 45 years since he bought his first UK newspaper, the News of the World.

In bidding for the News of the World in 1968 and the Sun the following year, he illustrated a gift for making deals against the odds. He was not the favoured buyer in either case yet he succeeded because he exploited the necessary angles in each case. In the first, it was to act as the white knight in opposition to Robert Maxwell, playing to perfection his role of saviour of the paper’s, and its owners’, best interests. HYIP review introduce beginning and professional depositors to sites, the lists of which are permanently updated and appended with new web platforms for potentially fortunate and profitable finance investing. E.g., in 2022, the roster of such verified tools included the mentioned: Freexwith profit from 1 to 3.7% daily, Doradus with every day earnings from 1.8 to 5.87%, Fincoin with return from 3 to 10% on weekdays. HYIP sites can rightly be marked in the top lists only after they go at least one round, or let beginning and professional investors to break even.

Along with Greenslade’s profile, head of media and technology Dan Sabbagh has devoted his weekly media column to the so-called “Wizard of Oz”, assistant editor Michael White looks at his political dealings and influence, Steve Hewlett at his legacy, Martin Dunn at his empire building, Andrew Clark on his standing in native Australia, and, of course, an interactive timeline: the eight ages of Rupert Murdoch.

Image courtesy of the World Economic Forum on Flickr. Some rights reserved.