IHT.com has developed a version of the site for iPhone users. The version is ‘iPhone optimised’ rather than being an iPhone app – e.g. an application built exclusively for the iPhone – co-creator Michael Cosentino is keen to point out in a blog post.
Last week the New York Times announced plans to develop an application for the Apple device.
Silicon Valley Insider talked to Marc Frons, chief technology officer of NYTimes digital, about the projects he’s working on and the development that they’ll be rolling out in the near future. Here’s a brief overview:
Things we have already covered:
The shock of the new:
The Associated Press wants to grab itself a prime piece of technological real estate, it announced last week that it wants an AP button on the iPhone start-up page for quick access to news.
“There was a button for stocks, there was a button for weather, but there was no button for news,” says Jeffrey Litvack, director of global product development with the AP.
According to Forbes, the AP wants to be the organisation to run any ‘news’ button.
The AP launched its Mobile News Network last week.
Litvack says it can distribute stories from AP reporters and over 100 papers in a single service. He’s hoping its perfect for the iPhone and that Apple is listening.
Live blogging service CoverItLive is planning some handy updates including possible integration with fellow online tool Twitter.
Details are uncertain at the moment, but Keith McSpurren, president of CoverItLive, says an iPhone version is also in the pipeline.
Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for de Volkskrant, is part of the team behind EN.nl – a bold project to redesign the news site. The site makes the most of its users in reshaping its design and includes a healthy dose of technological innovation alongside this wiki attitude.
Baan says the team built a version of the site for the iPhone within an hour and making the site work across different devices is key to how it’s been built.
After an initial introduction to the site through Paul Bradshaw’s blog, Journalism.co.uk asked Baan for more insight into the project:
1) What is the thinking behind the design EN.nl? How will its features improve the delivery of news to readers?
EN asks readers to participate. The design wants to stimulate participation. The horizontal timeline (below) shows the rhythm of news, the published articles over the last 24 hours.
When there is breaking news this often results in large amounts of small articles. This will make the bars of the hours that the news breaks relatively high compared to the rest of the day.
EN.nl is an evolving project. The design is an experiment and we had positive and negative feedback on the horizontal timeline. Positive is that it enables you to scan over a hundred articles relatively fast. The negative aspect is that it doesn’t show hierarchy. Everything is time-based.
On a NING network we ask everyone to share ideas and thoughts. We are open about the development process and made this a public experience.
2) How do you decide what content makes it onto the site?
EN is linked to a feed from a Dutch Press agency (ANP). This makes the website – for now – a closed system with a focus on news. ANP produces around a hundred articles a day and covers the whole spectrum of news reporting in the Netherlands.
There are already people asking to write articles. For example one reader is already bending the system and creating interesting articles. He takes an article and uses this as a container for ‘more important’ news.
There are some things you have to think about when opening the system for everyone to write articles. Relevancy and the truth become more important. We trust press agencies. How do you build online trust or what is important in developing a reputation system? And how do you decide what article is relevant and for whom?. Should we syndicate more news sources and should we syndicate with bloggers?
I think EN will develop to something where everyone can write and submit articles and I think it will be closely linked to a relevancy system. If you are a soccer fan your definition of soccer related news is different than that of a non-soccer fan.
3) On Paul Bradshaw’s blog you said: ‘The database is the most valuable asset of a news organisation’ – can you explain why you think this?
The web is fragmenting or – maybe even better – the web is everywhere: on your mobile phone, television, widgets, feeds, website and more. Making information portable is important for a news organization, because you probably can’t develop something for every niche platform or website.
Making collections and connecting data creates new value. If your information is easily accessible and contains valuable meta information then this gives additional tools to a news organization and enables them to move fast or enable their readers to create the tools they desire.
If your news (articles, photos, audio, video) is stored with good meta information and accessible it makes it easy to work with third parties in developing new value like location based services or news linked to your profile on another website. And even more important it will be cheaper to develop since you don’t have to update your archive with meta information.
I don’t know exactly what device or service will be popular in five years, but I guess the article as a container will still be popular.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has released a detailed report about how he sees Apple quadrupling its 2008 sales and hitting the 45m figure he had previously predicted.
These are the key elements:
– Introducing a 3G iPhone within the next 3 to 6 months
– Offering a family of 2 to 3 iPhones – including lower-priced models selling for $200 to $300 – by Jan 2009 at the latest
– Entering new countries, effectively doubling the addressable market every year for the next two years
– Adding new features, such as games and remote purchases starting in June.
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, Adam Tinworth, RBI.
1) Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Adam Tinworth, and I’m currently head of blogging for business publisher Reed Business Information.
2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
I’m a Twitter addict, and am constantly keeping up with the discussions there, either on my laptop or my iPhone.
More stories “break” to me through Twitter right now than any other sources. It’s so quick and easy to publish out with it, you can get news to people before you’re even on the second paragraph of a traditional news story.
I couldn’t live without my RSS feeds. I’ve been an RSS junkie for long enough that I predate Google Reader. I keep my subscriptions in Newsgator, so I can access them in NetNewsWire on my Mac, FeedDemon on my work PC, and the iPhone web version on my, well, iPhone.
While once upon a time I was a heavy forum user (and a Usenet/Mailing List guy before that), most of my conversational reading is in the blogosphere now.
I find the much stronger sense of a huge range of personalities you get on people’s blogs much more appealing than the handful of dominant personalities that tend to dominate forum-like discussion places. And I speak as someone who has been one of those selfishly dominant personalities in the past. I also occasionally flirt with social networks (note that that’s “flirt with” not “flirt in” :)), but find them limited and frustrating.
That said, both Seesmic and Flickr, which have strong similarities with forums, are sites I wish I had more time to explore the true potential of.
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 newsgathering tool?
Honestly, I think we’re only just scratching the surface of how blog-based CMS could completely change the way we deliver news to interested people.
I suspect that the news sites of the future will have much more in common with blogs that than monolithic sites with clunky, slow back-ends we build right now.
4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
Facebook (and social network sites in general). I think they’re interesting “walled garden” communication tools, but their strength is also their weakness: they only expose you to the thoughts and recommendations of those you already know.
They are something of an echo chamber, in which existing relationships are reinforced, rather than a way of being exposed to anything (or anyone) new.
Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry. This week, Jack Lail of Knoxville News Sentinel.
1) Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Jack D. Lail. I’m the managing editor/multimedia for the Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I am in charge of the editorial content on our family of websites that include knoxnews.com and govolsxtra.com.
2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
AIM, Twitter and Facebook mainly. I dabble in lots of others. Email? Is that a social media tool? Live in it. Google Reader? Certainly use it every day.
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 newsgathering tool?
I continue to think the unsexy RSS feed has the largest potential and is the most important tool. Twitter and Facebook have potential.
Next is blogging, if you consider that a social media tool. It is critical for mainstream media to adopt and adapt. Because it is a web native publishing platform as well as a social network, it engages and creates community in very effective ways.
Not a software tool, but the iPhone is the biggest game changer in terms of new platform. I’m actually starting to believe the hype about the mobile web.
Users get that product and every other hardware maker is improving their smart phone offerings at a more rapid pace. Did we just go from Gopher to Netscape in the mobile space?
4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
YouTube and Facebook notwithstanding, user-generated content seems to be the most overrated social media ‘news’ craze or the most ineptly executed by traditional media organisations.
I think you’ll see a few sites that thrive at this and nail it and everybody else will suck. There seems to be a difference also in layering in news in social media sites and creating community around news.
Obviously, there are more social media sites being launched than can be supported by audiences or business models. Is it spring and time to prune?
Each week we give technology 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 it’s data as journalism with online spreadsheets from EditGrid.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello, I’m David Lee, from EditGrid.
EditGrid is an online spreadsheet service that does for numbers what blogs and wikis do for text.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
It can be useful for journalist in multiple ways: managing simple lists and mini-databases so that the data can be shared, collaborated and accessed anywhere (including iPhone and Facebook) and publishing of tables and charts.
The Daily Kos has used us to publish quick and easy charts of US primary election results.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We keep enhancing the sharing and publishing capabilities to make EditGrid more powerful.
In the future it will be the platform to access live data (financial and much more). Users already created live financial spreadsheets attracting tens of thousands of users and million of views.
4) Why are you doing this?
Spreadsheet is a technology area in which the fundamentals haven’t been changed for more than 20 years.
Now we can make online spreadsheet running in a web browser which multiple people can edit at the same time with changes synchronising in real-time.
We see much potential in it and believe it will revolutionise the ways people use spreadsheets.
5) What does it cost to use it?
Free of charge for personal users, US$5 per user for organisations.
6) How will you make it pay?
We offer most of the features for free but we charge organisations $5/user/month and provide more administration and security features.
Currently, we’re more interested in growing our base to hundreds-of-thousands of users, we may charge for future value-added features and/or premium data access but what our users can enjoy for free now will remain free forever. 🙂
In a recent blog post, the Washington Post’s Rob Curley applauds the Las Vegas Sun newspaper for its coverage of a fire at the Monte Carlo hotel, Las Vegas. Curley heaps praise on the layered and multimedia approach the paper took in its reporting, as well as the speed with which it was produced.
This is his breakdown of how the news was reported by the Sun:
1. Began with a live blog, regularly updated by the newsroom staff.
2. Addition of photos – the newspaper also set up a way for users to submit their own images through Flickr.
3. Overview of the situation and context e.g. history of the Monte Carlo hotel.
4. Addition of videos – all put up, as Curley points out, while the building was still burning.
“To me, this was a nearly textbook example of how a local newspaper should cover a big breaking news story in its community in the iPhone era,” Curley writes.
His advice to other newspaper newsrooms: be prepared for breaking news.
Why bother? Because, says Curley, local news organisations should use their proximity to events to beat off the competition and serve their audience best.
A comment on this article from Saturday’s print edition of the newspaper, which was used to complement the web coverage, neatly sums up Curley’s argument: “I couldn’t have got that from CNN or any other news station. I was hooked from the start.”
