In this article and video (below), James Cox, the creator of Twitter account @CNNbrk, gives his thoughts on working with big news organisations and what having greater access to news means to the user.
NB: Since the Nieman story was published, @CNNbrk has broken the one million follower mark.
Great excerpted footage from an interview with Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray on the new skills needed by reporters and news organisations – including marketing – a dirty word for an older generation of journalists.
In a digital newsroom or organisation the basic unit of news is no longer the story, but less rigidly defined, writes Martin Langeveld.
“The metaphor of content as a cascading stream means there is no unit – a stream is a stream, it has no discernible building blocks. And it means that content doesn’t sit still. It is never static, but always changing,” he explains.
The cascade can be started by journalists’ own newsgathering or from a wealth of UGC and will no longer end at publication by the newsroom, but instead flow into social networks and blogs, creating a new stage for that content.
Kansas.com, the site of US newspaper The Wichita Eagle, saw its traffic surge last month, making it the 15th most-visited US newspaper site for February, according to Nielsen Online.
The spike was partly a result of a link to one of the Eagle’s stories appearing on the homepage of Yahoo.
Yet despite this influx of visitors the site can’t monetise such peaks, because of the ‘dirt-cheap remnant advertising’ it runs during such surges, as Nieman reports.
MinnPost, a non-profit, news site, has opened its most popular blog to micro-sponsors, who pay give $10-$25 donations to the channel.
According to Nieman, 127 people have donated a total of $2,575 since the offer was launched a week ago.
The Times’ new community sites aren’t going to make any money, Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at the paper, concedes.
But Schachter does see potential in syndicating the platform out to community groups.
He’s not getting ahead of himself with the project though: “We don’t know if the placeblogosphere wants us or needs us.”
Matthew Ingram, communities editor at the Globe and Mail in Canada, discusses the highs and lows of setting up a Public Policy Wiki on the paper’s website.