Spot.us, the crowd-funded journalism venture that launched 10 months ago in San Francisco with funding from the Knight Foundation, has expanded to Southern California as its second market, the LA Times reported yesterday.
Two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, have been sentenced to 12 years of hard labour in North Korea ‘in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontation with the United States,’ the New York Times reports.
“Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were on a reporting assignment from Current TV, a San Francisco-based media company co-founded by Al Gore, the former vice president, when they were detained by the soldiers.”
Tony Elliott, the proprietor of listings magazine Time Out, is considering selling control of the title to help fund online expansion.
“We want to develop in Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds and Manchester; in Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And we’d certainly not look to launch magazines in places like Paris or Los Angeles without a developed website in place first,” he told the Times.
“Digital is becoming a bigger chunk of our revenue than print. Print is still very strong for us. Digital, it’s not much more than half, but it’s more than half,” Onlon President-CEO, Steve Hannah, told Ad Age, in the last question of a Q&A this week.
Hannah also denied rumours that the Onion’s weekly print edition is to be shut down, although Ad Age reports that the Onlon’s San Francisco and Los Angeles print editions have been closed.
Communication via a Ning network led to tickets for a information architects’ (IA) mini-conference in London ‘selling’ out in just ten minutes.
Information architecture is ‘the emerging art and science of organising large-scale websites,’ increasingly important for media sites.
The Ning network created by Ken Beatson last year, has allowed the UK’s information architects to talk more freely and effectively than via the old mailing list system, Martin Belam, a member of the group and information architect for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.
An event was set up, hosted for free at the Guardian’s offices and sponsored by Axure and Aquent, and after a bit of promotion via its Twitter account (@london_ia), 40 tickets were rapidly snapped up for the event which will take place on April 20. Another 10 will also be released at midday on Friday.
The event will see participants talk for 10-15 minute slots in an informal way.
Martin Belam told Journalism.co.uk that ‘the goal of good information architecture is that people understand information,’ so it suits them to share knowledge and skills in this way. London is one of the biggest centres for information architects, perhaps the biggest outside New York and San Francisco, he said.
An overlap between editorial and technological roles is increasingly important for newspapers, Belam added.
Belam hopes that the event could be rolled out three times a year, with the next one being held in September.
Also see: Q&A with Martin Belam here.
The video of the police shooting of Oscar Grant III in Oakland, California, has spread quickly over YouTube in the last week, greatly influencing the nature of the media reports. The most popular video is the clip that originally aired on news channel KTVU, a FOX affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Handheld video-enabled cameras and cell phones at the ready, alert witnesses at the scene caught the shooting and the moments that preceded it from different angles.
“In one of their videos, an onlooker yells at a woman recording the scene: ‘Put it on YouTube!’
“Local and national television stations have aired and re-aired excepts from the raw and grainy videos, which have taken on a new life online.”
Imagine if such footage existed in cases such as the UK police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: how would reportage or subsequent events have been different? Would the UK media have used the footage in the same way?
Also – does film like this show that we have reached a point where video quality can be disregarded when it’s a strong news story?
Watch the YouTube video ‘Bart Police shooting in Oakland KTVU report‘ here:
(Try saying that headline 10 times fast)
First up, the Financial Times has announced a new RSS service for corporate users – an add-on for those paying subscribers who signed up for the site’s direct licence system introduced in April last year.
The customisable RSS feed will be available to corporate customers, who under the licence arrangement are entitled unlimited access to FT content on FT.com and third-party services, and can be tailored by specific search terms, a press release from the title said.
Not full-fat feeds as yet – users will click through to read articles on the main website.
Elsewhere, technology journalists at the FT’s San Francisco bureau have been experimenting with FriendFeed to create a single source of their links, articles and blog posts (it can also be used for Twitter and Flickr updates):
“LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian internet startup, has cut about 20 of 28 employees and offered them no severance,” Gawker reports.
Having secured $25 million of funding and launched its Chicago section in beta, the Huffington Post is reportedly eyeing further expansion with plans for San Francisco coverage.
The launch of a network of HuffPo local editions is still in the planning stage, however, the San Francisco Chronicle was told.
So it’s next stop San Fran, then – the world. The site’s international section is also in beta:
And another for your watching pleasure. This comes from Blip TV: a brief interview with the Wall Street Journal’s deputy managing editor Alan Murray, on the WSJ’s 25-30 videos a day, the majority of which are produced by the paper’s reporters.
Kelsey Blodget, associate producer writes:
“As part of a strategy to integrate online video with the reporting, The Journal trains reporters on a regular basis in New York and San Francisco to use Sony HDR-HC9 cameras.”