The Huffington Post is to expand its coverage to local news in the US.
The plans will start with a site for Chicago, aggregating news from different local sources and with contributions from local bloggers. The site will be overseen by one editor.
Ariana Huffington said yesterday around a dozen US cities would feature in the expansion plans.
The US celebrity tabloid ‘news’ TV show and website TMZ has started using mobile phone technology to live stream video of celebrity goings-on.
And it’s all a great success Alan Citron, general manager of TMZ tells Beet TV.
And the real crowd pullers?
A courthouse appearance by Hulk Hogan’s son and a two hour stream of a car park where Britany was expected to arrive.
‘Hypnotic effect’ of the car park kept viewers interested says Citron.
Glam – this celeb business.
For political newsjunkies looking for their next hit: look no further than Newsjunk – a recently set-up site that aggregates and summarises all the US political coverage you can take.
Posting rapidly updated links to a range of other sites, Newsjunk is an incessant source of political news. A page on the site ranks the post popular articles by number of clicks against the number of hours its been on the site with no items kept up for more than 24 hours.
Fast and furious, but a great way to brush up on your politics in a flash.
Boston.com, the website for the Boston Globe, has added MetaCarta‘s geotagging technology to improve the localised search on the site.
Content from the site and others that are included by Boston.com’s search will be automatically tagged by MetaCarta allowing users to search by geographical area.
The aim, says a press release from the New York Times Company, is to increase the frequency of users and page traffic.
In March MetaCarta to launched a new website mapping news stories from across the globe, having previously teamed up with Reuters to offer a map of US news stories.
The LA Times has created two great interactive features online: the first allows users to see different voting outcomes of November’s presidential election on a map of the US.
Using data from the 2004 election, states on the map can be assigned to either Obama or McCain, showing users how a winning these constituencies will affect the candidates’ chances overall.
The second marks the Californian soldiers who have lost their lives in the Iraq conflict.
Video, image galleries and a searchable database of soldiers’ profiles have been created, accompanied by moving text tributes from family members
The online consumption of newspapers has risen by 20% in the last year and by 100% over the last three years, according to stats released at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference.
The World Digital Media Trends report – collected by 71 research companies and covering 232 countries – also suggested a 13.77% rise in the number of newspaper websites in the world bringing the total to 4,500.
52% of readers who view newspaper websites spend the same amount of time reading newspapers, according to the stats; while 35% say the time they spend with either print or online newspapers has increased.
Figures presented for print circulation worldwide presented an equally positive picture.
The circulation of paid for print dailies rose by 2.98% last year with the total number of titles increasing by 27.22%.
573,235,00 paid and free newspapers are distributed every day and 1.75 billion people read a print edition a day.
Print circulation in China, India and Latin America also showed growth.
Presenting the figures, WAN chairman Timothy Balding said these were just the facts, without sentiment or analysis.
And while figures pointing out that revenue in the advertising industry is still dominated by the print went hand in hand with the positivity of the circulation figures, follow-up sessions at the conference on integration and the challenges of web 2.0 to newspapers will perhaps paint a more cautious picture.
As Christophe Pleitgen, head of news for Reuters UK, told delegates in a later session:
“We are living on borrowed time. In a sense, some of us may have more time, while colleagues in the US would say it is high time. It’s great that newspaper editors are optimistic about the future. They have gotten on with integrating their newsrooms – doing that is more urgent than most of us think.”
Erica Smith, blogger at Paper Cuts and newspaper and multimedia designer at the St Louis Post-Dispatch, has mapped the job losses across the US newspaper industry this year.
Pins in the Google map are colour-coded to show how many jobs lost in each instance and can be clicked for more details of the redundancies.
The total so far for 2008 is 3,020 and rising, the blog states.
Depressing viewing, but the map gives a good snapshot of the state of the industry.
Sky News yesterday used live blogging service CoveritLive to host a debate between candidates standing in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election (thanks to Simon Dickson and his Puffbox blog for the tip).
Candidates Tamsin Dunwoody (Labour), Elizabeth Shenton (Lib Dem) and Edward Timpson (Conservatives) responded to questions directly from readers of the blog and Sky News’ host Martin Stanford.
The service is becoming increasingly popular with news sites: today the Lancashire Evening Post is liveblogging an afternoon from a local pub, while US newspaper the Grand Island Independent used the tool as a feedback channel during the redesign of its website.
Elsewhere Farmers’ Weekly is liveblogging ‘an afternoon in the life of the newsroom’ – a similar experiment to that conducted by the Liverpool Daily Post.
Read Journalism.co.uk’s interview with CoveritLive president Keith McSpurren.
Pete Clifton, head of editorial development for multimedia journalism at the BBC, has said 47 per cent of the 17 million weekly unique users to the BBC News website come from outside of the UK.
Around half of these users, he told the Online Publishers Association conference, are from the US with a strong ex-pat following, but growing interest from US nationals in the BBC’s news coverage.
The site is also popular in India and Canada, Clifton added.
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, Kevin Anderson, Guardian.co.uk.
1) Who are you and what do you do?
Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at Guardian.co.uk.
My title is misnomer seeing as desk editors handle most of the commissioning.
My role is two-fold. I spot newsworthy items bubbling up in social media – blogs, social news sites, Twitter, etc – and report on that or pass it along to the appropriate site editor.
I also seed and develop strategies to promote Guardian content in those social networks. My current focus is what I call real-time innovation. I use emerging tools for editorial purposes and feed back lessons we learn into our editorial development process.
2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
People ask me how I stay on top of it all, and I say that my network is my filter. I have Twhirl and IM on constantly, sitting in the background. New media professionals and contacts around the world pass me things I need to read or stories I need to follow up on through Skype, Twitter, IM and Del.icio.us.
Popurls.com is a great one-stop site for buzz, especially for the US elections, which I’m following right now. NetNewsWire, Flock and Ecto are my blogging tools of choice.
The Flock browser is good in a number of ways. Its Flickr uploader is great – better than Flickr’s until recently. It also allows you to add sites to multiple Del.icio.us accounts.
You can go from reading your RSS feeds to blogging instantly in Flock, as it pulls NetNewsWire functionality into the browser too.
For publishing, a combination of Ecto and any good blogging platform creates the best multimedia journalism tool that I’ve ever used.
I recently got a Nokia N82. With its stellar camera and integrated Flickr uploader it has a lot of promise , but it’s hampered by poor data plans in the UK.
The mobile carriers are focusing on USB-based data plans to link computers to the mobile web, which maybe a good start, but there are still too few good data plans for phones.
I end up relying on WiFi, which on the N82 is much better than on previous phones.
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 think in terms of editorial objectives and then find an applicable tool. In 12 years of doing online journalism, I’ve had to learn hundreds of desktop tools, content management systems and now a dizzying range of social media tools.
You have to be aware of them to work effectively. Knowing about the tools allows me to do something on deadline without worrying whether it can be developed on time.
However, the problem with most news organisations isn’t a lack of tools or technology but a cultural lack of editorial understanding of social media, internet media and internet culture.
Most news organisations continue to try to force their existing editorial strategies into the social media space instead of considering editorial strategies that are appropriate for the space.
Online video isn’t television on the internet, just as blogs are not about publishing a newspaper with comments.
I can use Twitter both as a newsgathering and promotional tool, or I can just use it to broadcast headlines at people.
Social media can increase loyalty from visitors to a site and increase the time they spend on the site, but it’s not about the tools but the way that journalists use them.
4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
I hate to sound like a broken record because others have said this before, but I really think Facebook is overrated for the majority of our audiences.
Traditional journalists who had never seen, much less used a social network before, hyped it because it was a revelation to them.
However, for those who had used social networks before, it was YASN – yet another social network – only shinier, with 20 per cent more Web 2.0 goodness.
I believe in freeing content and making it available where the audiences are, so it makes sense for content to be easily available to Facebook users and for news organisations to have a presence there.
News organisations can learn things from the success of Facebook, but they should also study the life cycle of social networks and learn not only from their successes but also from their failures.
Allowing like-minded readers or viewers to connect and interact using your content as a focus is a good social media strategy.
Hosting and taking an active role in the conversations around your content is also a good social media strategy.
Building a site or service that externalises community and keeps the ‘unwashed masses’ at a safe distance from journalists creates nasty overheads. It also means managing communities and brings nothing to your journalism and very little to your site visitors.
Why would Facebook users decide to move to InsertNewspaperHere-book?