Wednesday’s edition of the Exploding Newsroom: Jim Willse, the editor of the New Jersey based newspaper, the Star-Ledger, talks about the future of the newsroom now that the conditions have been met to avoid a sale or closure of the paper.
“We face a significant challenge,” he says.
You can follow the online editor John Hassell’s Exploding Newsroom on Facebook, at the blog, and over at Kyte TV.
Nice use of timeline builder Dipity by the Evening Leader: the paper has plotted videos and text reports of UFO sitings in the area onto a timeline, turned it into a widget and embedded it on its website.
What’s extra nice is that the Dipity widget lets readers look at the info as a timeline, map, flipbook or list. Using the third-party service helps the newspaper get extra mileage out of what are no doubt already popular online stories.
The feature has also been made ‘public’ through dipity’s site to help drive traffic back to the Evening Leader.
The tool has previously been used by the Manchester Evening News for its coverage of a proposed congestion charge for the city; and the Liverpool Daily Post to create a 24-hour snapshot of Liverpool as this year’s European Capital of Culture.
We could hardly resist putting this pretty map up here, and the motive behind its design makes it even better. The reason is arrived in our inboxes today is because the Economist is inviting the world to vote in the American presidential election in its Global Electoral College (GEC) – we can dream that it would have an impact, at least.
Now, this isn’t some kind of ‘let’s influence the silly Americans’ à la the Guardian’s G2 2004, but a rather nice re-drawing of the electoral map. In the new version 195 of the world’s countries get a say in the outcome of the next presidential election.
“America’s presidential campaign has fascinated people around the world, the Economist.com’s editor, Daniel Franklin said In the release accompanying the map. “Maddeningly, though, only Americans get to vote. But what if the entire world had a say?”
Although based on the American system, it aims to put pay to the significance of the swing vote (‘there are few countries whose votes in the GEC are a foregone conclusion’). The vote closes November 2 2008 when the results will be announced live in New York.
Online, users can look at the world map to see how each of candidates is doing on a global, and country-by-country basis, and find links to the Economist’s election analysis. Right now it’s looking pretty good for Obama. For starters he has 94 per cent of votes in India, 88 per cent of votes in Britain, and 86 per cent support him in China.
It gets more complicated than this, so visit the website for more details.
The BBC’s technology correspondent describes his experience of using the tools to cover an Apple music event.
The BBC’s head of multimedia programmes, Stephen Mitchell, outlines the corporation’s new approach to working across TV, radio and online.
The BBC’s business and economics unit has embarked on a new multimedia editorial project aimed at improving the storytelling of economic news.
The Box initiative is an attempt to ‘come up with a way of telling the real story of what’s happening in the global economy in a tangible, challenging and ambitious way’ across multiple BBC platforms, Jeremy Hillman, editor of the business and economics unit, writes on the BBC Editors Blog.
The box of the title refers to a BBC-branded shipping container equipped with a GPS transmitter, which will have its international journey tracked, updated and mapped on its own webpage.
“The journey this container follows over the next few months will be a real one, and whilst we will control some aspects of the process for logistical reasons, the story it tells will be a truly representative one, painting a picture of what globalisation really means,” writes Hillman.
The container began its journey in Southampton yesterday.
Hillman adds: “Whilst we have paid a little for the branding of the box and some technical costs, the fact this is a working container means it will be earning its own keep!”
Anderson will use a host of social media tools – including Twitter, Flickr and Dopplr – to report on the US presidential election during a 4,000 mile country-wide trip.
Wired magazine is publishing a blog about the commissioning and writing of a feature about Charlie Kaufman.The latest installment on September 5 sees some ‘creative brainstorming’ because Kaufman doesn’t want to sit for a photo-shoot.
The project outline on Wired.com says it’s ‘an almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature.’
Wired creative director Scott Dadich’s SPD blog, The Process, explains the design side of things. It posts internal e-mails, audio, video, drafts, memos, and layouts.
The thinking behind the one-off experiment is to ‘pull back the curtain’ on the process of making magazines. See the video The Birth of Storyboard for how it all began…
The University of California at Berkeley has given a Ford Foundation multimedia fellowship to Richard Koci Hernandez, current deputy director of multimedia at the San Jose Mercury News.
His aim is to develop digital news sites for under-served communities, according to the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), where Hernandez has led a series of multimedia workshops.
Hernandez is also reviving his website, www.multimediashooter.com, which was shut down earlier this year after being repeatedly hacked.
Over on Lost Remote, the Washington Post is claiming that its live stream of Hillary Clinton at yesterday’s Democrat convention in the US was one of the first times a newspaper has carried out this type of live video coverage using a mobile.
Reporter Ed O’Keefe used a mobile phone and software by Comet Technologies to produce the clip, which can be viewed here.
For more info on the paper’s digital strategies, read this online Q&A with the Washington Post from Poynter.