“One winner in particular, Ory Okolloh, has cultivated a platform specifically designed to technologically aid citizens in the collection of local news. Her site, Ushahidi – Swahili for ‘testimony’ – seeks to empower people in disenfranchised regions who frequently lack the resources to report on the atrocities occurring in their areas.”
On the subject, Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg’s post is well worth a read (via Mark Potts). Rosenberg has experience in the field – “[A]t Salon we tried every online revenue strategy you can imagine,” he writes.
“Yes, 2009 is different from 2000-2002. But the fundamental lesson remains: you can get some revenue from readers, and there’s nothing wrong with trying; but if in doing so you cut yourself off from the rest of the web in any way, you are dooming yourself to irrelevance and financial decline.”
Nieman Journalism Lab links to a copy of the American Press Institute (API) report prepared for the ‘paid content’ Chicago meeting for newspaper executives last week.
“Top newspaper execs (…) heard from several entrepreneurs who are proposing new ways for papers to generate revenue online,” NJL reported.
“More Americans now say they get most of their national and international news from the Web rather than from printed newspapers. Yet news publishers, and particularly publishers of the kind of essential journalism that’s necessary to sustain a democracy, enjoy a relatively small share of total Web traffic.
“Although no clear strategies have emerged for news publishers to thrive in an online-only environment, CircLabs believes that the right technology can play a key role in improving the market share of news content and increasing the Web revenue of news publishers.”
The first stage will be a product called Circulate. Details are scant at the moment, but it’s expected to be available in beta from the end of the summer and fully launched by the end of this year.
“Circulate addresses two critical publisher needs: (1) the need to attract, both locally and nationally, a strong and loyal online readership, and (2) the need to monetize that audience, both directly through the sale of premium content and indirectly through high-value, targeted and interactive advertising.
“Circulate will meet these needs of publishers and allow journalists to thrive in their roles as gatherers and curators of news and information. At the same time, Circulate will provide consumers with a new, post-search way to discover the news and connections they need. Circulate will serve all publishers of online news, ranging from newspapers to local news blogs. Circulate requires little or no technical integration on the part of publishers.”
There are plenty of videos of the day’s discussions on the event’s UStream site – though the player below should provide most of the links:
An internal memo from the New York Times, obtained by Nieman Journalism Lab, confirms the appointment of Jennifer Preston as the title’s first social media editor.
“Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond,” says the memo to employees.
While Preston will work on developing best practice procedures for social media use at the Times, the memo is clear that this is a progressive issue: “[W]e all need to figure this out together,” it states.
“Obviously, a newspaper doesn’t want to give away the store and tell everyone what stories it is working on, or tip its hand in a variety of other ways, and probably doesn’t want to go into detail about how certain stories emerged (especially if it was a fortuitous accident). But Jarvis is right that talking about stories that are under way can also have tremendous benefits,” Ingram writes.
Nieman Journalism Lab reports on NPR’s ‘backstory’ project – a Twitter account, automatically fed, that updates with relevant archive content around current trends.
The code that powers it detects if lots of people suddenly start searching for a certain term and searches NPR’s archives for related stories, before posting a link to Twitter.
Matthew Ingram examines the problems of paid-for aggregation for the Nieman Journalism Lab, using All Things Digital as a specific example.
“Curation has become a popular term in media circles, in the sense of a human editor who filters and selects content, and then packages it and delivers it to readers in some way. Many people (including me) believe that, in an era when information sources are exploding online, aggregation and curation of some kind is about the only service left that people might be willing to pay for.”
“Enough already. Partial facts and misinformation about newspapers are distorting the view for everyone, including readers and advertisers,” writes Donna Barrett over at Editor&Publisher.
“(…)The crisis facing newspapers is not an audience problem. It is a revenue problem.”