Tag Archives: Online Journalism

NYT: David Carr on the ‘vanishing divide’ between mainstream and digital media

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The New York Times’ David Carr reflects on what he perceives as the “vanishing divide” between mainstream and digital media, following the move of media writer Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post to The Daily Beast.

Carr addresses the evolution of web journalism, which he says is not only changing the way news is collected and presented but also the way it is valued by audiences. The brand, he says, is no longer the priority.

On a journalistic level, the new playing field is more even. Many people see the news in aggregated form on the web, and when they notice a link that interests them, they click on it with nary a thought about the news organization behind it. Information stands or falls on its magnetism, with brand pedigree becoming secondary.

More and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle.

See his full post here…

OJR: Storify boss Burt Herman on the move from journalist to CEO

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The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Hernandez has posted an interesting interview with Burt Herman, former Associated Press bureau chief, CEO of new startup Storify and founder of Hacks/Hackers.

Herman gives a great insight into his journey from journalist to CEO, as well as the story behind his founding of the popular Hacks/Hackers event which recently started running meetings in the UK.

The first big difference is that being a journalist gives you a daily sense of accomplishing something by writing a story and having it be published. You then move on to the next story and get constant feedback. Trying to create a business and develop internet applications is a much longer process, filled with many ups and downs along the way. It’s exciting to be your own boss but also can be terrifying at the same time. I suppose dropping into crisis zones and new countries was a decent preparation for this, and also just being open to always learning new things.

See the full post here…

Storify curates selected photos, videos, tweets and other notes by search, which can then be published as embeddable stories made up of original sources.

Here is a demo of Storify from Burt Herman posted on Vimeo.

OJB: New BBC linking guidelines

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Paul Bradshaw takes a look at the BBC’s new linking guidelines for its website and journalists and finds particular improvement in linking out to primary sources, such as scientific journals.

Full post on the Online Journalism Blog at this link…

The BBC has previously trialled inline links to a limited number of external sources, but has since pledged to double its external linking by 2013.

Courtesy of Guardian Technology via Scribd here are the guidelines in full:

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#WEFHamburg: Multimedia newsrooms vs. online-only outlets

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Multimedia news organisations or purely online outlets – which has the most sustainable model? This was the question posed in this morning’s panel discussion at the World Editors Forum. But before the debate could even begin, the question itself was quashed by Raju Narisetti, managing editor at the Washington Post.

The idea that one of these models is more sustainable for the other is a false choice for those of us in traditional media. It isn’t like we can just dump that and go to the purely online model. It’s an issue of legacy and mindset, the legacy is we all have fairly profitable newspapers to manage in addition to what we do online. We have to embrace the legacy and deal with it, we can’t walk away.

Comparing the models of each newsroom he outlined what he perceives as a different mindset behind online-only ventures which contrasts with that of traditional media.

Most traditional journalists talk about themselves as gatekeepers telling readers what they need to know. Some feel our job ends once we publish. But the online players have a very different mindset, their DNA is different. Their speed is not once a day as some of us are used to. They don’t think of themselves as gatekeepers, more like gate openers. They are much more metrics focused. (…) But there are different standards (…) I am happy to be held up to a higher standard.

Speaking next was Benoît Raphaël from LePost.fr, a news site subsidiary of Le Monde. He explained the theory behind Le Post’s model, which features news curated and aggregated from other sources.

You have to write about the most important topics of the day, so this means that 80 per cent of your newsroom are rewriting news stories everybody else is already writing about and that users can find in real time on Facebook and Twitter. So we felt the best service was to curate these stories from the media and web and then save time for unique stories. Users can help you as you don’t always know how to write stories, but they are experts in their hobbies (…) and this helps us to collect and then add value by finding the angle.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, he added that the model of digitised content is the future for all newsrooms, regardless of the platform or tools used to present it.

You have to focus the production of the news on the digital world, so you have to digitise all of your newsroom and then you can display it and organise it using different tools. A website is a tool, a newspaper is a tool – it’s just an offline browser.

The good question is how can we learn from each other.

More on Raju Narisetti’s comments during the debate at this link.

Click here for more information on how to follow the World Editors Forum with Journalism.co.uk.

#WEFHamburg: Google keynote – ‘we are not eating your omelette’

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The relationship between Google and news publishers returned to the spotlight today as the search engine’s vice president for Northern and Central Europe Philipp Schindler made his keynote speech at the World Editors Forum in Hamburg.

When asked if news publishers ‘produce the eggs’ while Google ‘eats the omelette’, Schindler argued that there was a “fundamental misunderstanding” about Google’s role in the new media environment.

I do not believe at all we are eating your omelette in any way. Google sends four billion people a month to our partners. This is of significant value. We’re paying out 1.7 billion dollars a quarter to our partners.

For years Google has had a close relationship with publishers and we then later we went on to buy companies to develop products to help publishers monetise better. We helped support them through a transition process. This process was not triggered or really accelerated by Google. There is a fundamental misunderstanding that what we are seeing today was caused by Google. It was a consumer trend.

Part of the challenge is coming from technology and this is also being faced by Google, sometimes people think we are immune to it but they are wrong. The path for us is that we should play the role of a technology partner, we should support the newspaper industry in developing platforms that help them to be successful based on those technology and consumer trends we are seeing.

But this is likely to be far from the final world on this at the World Editors Forum this week as a workshop scheduled for Friday will also look at how news publishers and Google can co-operate.

Also in Schindler’s keynote speech he outlined what he sees as the biggest current trends impacting on the publishing industry, focusing on mobile technologies which he said we still widely underestimate the power of.

The mobile revolution is an unbelievably big and powerful trend. This is in no way going to go away. I believe that we are underestimating the size of the trend.

Google, he added, is now a “mobile first company” with its top engineers busy working on finding the best in mobile.

Other important trends he highlighted include what he perceives as a “fundamental shift” towards richer media, with the increasing use of visualisations, personalisation and “a higher level of smartness”.

He added that news publishers could learn a lot from the gaming industry, indicating that the use of personalisation and rich audio/visual products will be key to the successful development of online publishing.

Finally, he put forward a trend of the future, using the increasing availability of mobile connectivity to improve the ease of translating news and building worldwide audiences.

Imagine a world where anybody can access any information in any language he wants, where you can use mobile phones to automatically translate a conversation between people for example.

Your audience could become truly global. Suddenly your niche is becoming pretty big. It’s going to take a few years before it’s at a point where it is seamless, but don’t bet against this one.

Reuters experiments with new points system for comments

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A new points system for managing comments on news articles is being experimented with at Reuters. Comments which meet its guidelines will be rewarded with higher status.

Writing on Reuters’ For The Record blog about the issue, the organisation’s global editor for ethics, innovation and values Dean Wright says he was becoming increasingly concerned about the state of comments on Reuters’ and other news organisations’ websites.

On some stories, the “conversation” has been little more than partisans slinging invective at each other under the cloak of anonymity.

I believe our time-challenged, professional readers want to see a more rewarding conversation―and my colleagues who lead Reuters.com are introducing a new process for comments that I believe will help bring that about.

Editors Weblog provides a simply summary of what is being developed:

Once a person creates an account with Reuters, he is assigned a “new user” status. His comments are initially treated with caution by moderators, who award the user “points” for every satisfactory response published. Once the user gains enough points, his account is promoted so that comments will be immediately published. If a promoted user decides to write distasteful comments, he will lose points and could be demoted back to the “new user” status.

Study of French news sites: Facebook sends 13 times more referrals than Twitter

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Facebook sends 13 times more click-throughs than Twitter to French news sites, according to a recent study.

The AT Internet Institute research reports that Twitter was responsible for just 0.1 per cent of referrals to the country’s top 12 news websites, compared to Facebook which sent 1.3 percent.

By taking the same number of websites into consideration, Google’s share was 40.6 per cent in France, in other words 30 times greater than Facebook. This figure remains high, but we should not forget that the main function of a search engine, such as Google, is to suggest links to Internet users. This is not the case for Facebook. Moreover, on average for French news websites, Facebook generated more traffic (1.3 per cent) than the search engine known as Bing (0.8 per cent).

The French study looked at the average share of visits from 6th to 12th September.

According to its own report on the figures, paidContent:UK said Facebook was rated as the seventh “referral giver” to UK newspaper websites by the Newspaper Marketing Agency in May.

New survey looks at independent online publishers’ experiences of media law

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Last month former Journalism.co.uk reporter Judith Townend conducted a survey into UK independent online publishers’ experience of media law.

It’s worth reading the findings from 71 respondents in full, especially the answers from participants on how they get legal advice and help. For independent sites (or those with a staff of fewer than 10) the reasons behind setting up the site have a strong influence on how they handle with legal complaints, as one publisher explained:

One publisher said a potentially tricky problem went away without any response on their part, after they were contacted by a company that had been the subject of a user’s comment on the site: “Chose to play dead and not respond to [the email] and wait and see… [we] would have removed item if legally threatened – not close enough to our own cause to be worth a big fight. Have heard no more though.”

For those writing for a campaigning purpose or who are highly critical of others in their writing, legal issues aren’t going to deter them from continuing their fight, it seems. For others, libel, copyright and other issues haven’t yet been a problem because their subject matter or publishing style hasn’t yet caused these conflicts.

Many others use a network of peers and through social media to source legal pointers and advice, often avoiding costly fees. But there’s a sense from respondents that this ad hoc approach, while useful, may not stand greater legal stress or develop as quickly as a publisher’s own needs.

Full survey results are available on Meeja Law at this link…

NearSay offers ‘neighbourhood news’ to New York

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NearSay, a new local and hyperlocal news site, has been launched in Manhattan according to a report by Lost Remote.

The site reportedly uses both aggregated information chosen by editors as well as stories currently filed by around 80 contributors.

According to NearSay’s website, its mission is “high quality neighbourhood news”:

We:

  • Let you personalise the news.  You tell us what neighborhoods and topics you care about;
  • Manage a veteran newsroom that covers the stories from your favorite publications, so there is less clutter in your inbox;
  • Curate every story on the site for quality and feature just the best of NearSay;
  • Show you the influential local voices who tell the inside scoop of what’s happening.

Lost Remote says it believes the site will branch out beyond Manhatten soon.

NewsTilt: What went wrong

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Earlier this year we reported that NewsLabs, the company behind the NewsTilt platform, appeared to have been closed by its founders.

NewsTilt, which launched in April, aimed to provide a place for journalists to publish their work and increase direct interaction with readers.

Journalism.co.uk had contacted one of the founders Paul Biggar to try and find out what went wrong following its demise and Biggar has now composed a detailed piece looking at why he thinks it failed, as well as the right choices made along the way. His comments may be useful reading for other online news start-ups:

NewsLabs failed because of internal problems and problems with the NewsTilt product. NewsTilt failed because:

  • journalists stopped posting content;
  • we never had a large number of readers;
  • we were very slow to produce the features we had promised;
  • we did not have the money to fix the issues with NewsTilt, and it would have been tough to raise more.

None of these problems should have been unassailable, which leads us to why NewsLabs failed as a company:

  • Nathan and I had major communication problems;
  • we weren’t intrinsically motivated by news and journalism;
  • making a new product required changes we could not make;
  • our motivation to make a successful company got destroyed by all of the above.

See his full post here…

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