As part of its ‘Doing More With Less’ series, the Editors Weblog interviews some of the team behind not-for-profit investigative journalism site, VoiceOfSanDiego.org, set up to fill the emerging gap in local analytical and accountability journalism.
Video of the Citizen Media Project’s David Ardia explaining why – under US law – editors are not legally liable for changing comments left on their news sites.
As Pat Thornton points out:
“This falsehood must stop now. It’s been used — knowingly and unknowingly — by news organizations for years as justification not to allow user comments.”
Jeff Jarvis argues against government subsidies for the print industry, but backs President Obama’s pledge to increase US broadband penetration.
The Washington Post has launched a new beta site Whorunsgov.com to build profiles of US politicians, law makers and government officials using a specially created Post editorial team.
The site and its news blog will also feature contributions from external experts, a release from the paper said, and will be expanded into a moderated wiki later this year.
At this stage users will be encouraged to edit and add to profiles on the site with submissions moderated by the editorial team.
Interactivity – in particular allowing users to discuss profiles on the site – is a key part of the project:
“This is the first phase of a new venture to create a uniquely collaborative and rich information resource that demystifies the individuals behind Washington’s policy-making process,” said Rachel Van Dongen, editor of WhoRunsGov.com, in the release, adding that the site is intended as a free-for-all resource.
Those featured on the site will also grow to include think tank members and state officials.
It seems that more and more people are eschewing television in favour of online content, when it comes to obtaining and providing coverage of important events.
According to the Associated Press, eight million users watched the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States in Washington D.C on Tuesday, via AP’s Online Video Network (OVN).
At its peak, AP claim that as many as 374,000 streams were accessed concurrently.
This is a significant increase from the 80,000 live streams AP recorded during its coverage of the presidential election night in November.
In addition, 160 media outlets subscribed to their premium service, which provided a video widget allowing for multiple viewing angles of the event.
Static media also enjoyed a healthy rise, with AP Images and AP Exchange together recording an 80 per cent peak over regular traffic to their sites during the event.
In total, over 1,400 inaugural images passed through their services from around the globe.
AP were not alone in their online triumph. CNN shattered its own record four-fold, by attracting 136 million views of its website and 21.3 million viewers to its live streaming coverage.
Web users were so busy watching President Obama sworn into office that Google noticed a distinct drop in the number of searches performed during the inaugural address.
Over at a US-based local media site, an article from the Independent Weekly. It argues that newspaper owner Gannett has ‘ransacked’ the Daily Advertiser, the daily paper in Lafayette, Louisiana. Here, the the site’s looks at a ‘chain reaction’ impacting on the paper. Full story…
Despite partnering with more than 800 US newspapers, Google has decided to end its Print Ads scheme, which saw the search engine help partners run traditional print-based advertising campaigns.
According to a post on the search engine’s Let’s Take It Offline blog, the service wasn’t having the desired impact and resources behind the project will be reinvested in finding other revenue sources for publishers through Google’s products.
“We believe fair and accurate journalism and timely news are critical ingredients to a healthy democracy. We remain dedicated to working with publishers to develop new ways for them to earn money, distribute and aggregate content and attract new readers online. We have teams of people working with hundreds of publishers to find new and creative ways to earn money from engaging online content. AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Earth, Google News and many other products are a part of our significant investments to innovate in this space,” said Spencer Spinnell in the post.
“These important efforts won’t stop. We will continue to devote a team of people to look at how we can help newspaper companies.”
Google began trialling print advertising in 2005. The ads will no longer be available from February 28, though campaigns already planned will be run until March 31.
Today’s Hitwise report showing that UK internet traffic to the website has increased by 974 per cent over the last year (now the 291st most popular website in the UK), brings with it significant statistics for media and news sites:
(Hitwise report, January 2009)
As PaidContent flags up, Twitter is proportionally more popular in the UK than in the US. “This frankly could be because there are more websites or more diverse interests in the US,” comments Robert Andrews.
As Craig Silverman points out, CNN has come up with a rather novel way to atone for a mistake – by offering free advertising.
The network mistakenly aired footage about the island Yap calling it Guam.
After we reblogged NPR’s proposals for inauguration coverage with a social media twist, it’s great to see the plans coming into action.
The broadcaster has created Inauguration Report, which features location-based reports from readers and listeners watching the inauguration events in Washington and elsewhere, submitted by text, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.
By tagging their entries by location, e.g. L:lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, NPR will map the accounts. Real-time updates from contributors will feed into this stream.