A few takeaway points from the New York Times Company’s results yesterday:
The Boston Globe has launched a daily news video update. The 90-second broadcast is available on the paper’s homepage, Boston.com, between 11:45 and 1:45 pm EST. As reported here earlier this week, the Globe’s sister paper the New York Times has also launched a midday video news update, TimesCast.
Globe Today is more of a traditional news broadcast than TimesCast, which takes a behind-the-scenes approach, and is significantly shorter, weighing in at less than a quarter of the length of the Times’ feature.
The other significant difference is that Globe Today also appears on YouTube, making it embeddable, meaning I can embed it for you right here:
Patch, AOL’s growing network of hyperlocal news and information websites in the US, has announced the foundation of a new charitable arm, Patch.org:
Patch.org will partner with community foundations and other organisations to launch Patch sites and bring objective local news and information to communities and neighborhoods around the world that lack adequate news media and online local information resources.
The Patch.org sites will employ a local journalist to produce original news and content, and aggregate material and information created by the community. Any revenue earned by the sites will be invested back into the community they serve, a press release says.
Reed Business Information (RBI) has sold its Furniture Today group of titles to Sandow Media, part of private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson.
No financial terms have been disclosed for the deal, which includes Furniture Today, Casual Living and Interior Design magazine, according to a media release from Sandow.
The sale is the latest in a series of deals as part of the piecemeal divestment of a number of RBI’s B2B and trade titles, after the company’s attempt to sell the whole of its magazine publishing arm failed in December 2008.
The LA Times takes a look at the Seattle-Post Intelligencer a year after the 146-old US newspaper went only online-only and was reborn as SeattlePI.com:
[I]n the year since the Post-Intelligencer printed its last edition and laid off all but 20 of 160 employees, Guzman, Connelly and their co-workers have been unleashed to cover and link to just about whatever they want. Amateur journalists have been invited to join their ranks. Other media outlets have been thrown into the mix. A 146-year-old newspaper has been reborn as an internet-only news site that invites material from almost all comers.
Assistant editor of new media for a local news publisher in the US, Paul Balcerak looks at how a bread-and-butter bad weather story can use social media for more than just crowdsourcing images from readers by sharing information and answering their questions:
Essentially, I was trying to flip the information flow around (again), by asking, “What do you need?” and hyperfocus it down to an individual level. To me, that’s what social media is anyway: connecting one-to-one to help each other. If even just one person @ replied me and asked about where to find a place with power and free WiFi, that’s one person helped (and I’m betting a few more people would’ve been interested in the information anyway).
Each year the US Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) produces a report on the State of the News Media, aggregating other reports on what has happened to news organisations during the previous 12 months and providing its own research into what lies ahead.
The 2010 report weighs in on paywalls, and why there’s still a “hill to climb”; the increasingly niche-focus of both traditional news organisations and new online-only players; and features a special report on the state of community media or citizen journalism projects.
It’s an incredibly thorough survey – featuring figures on changes in advertising spend across all sectors and analysis of news sites’ traffic figures – and is best read in full at this link.
Some highlight quotes:
Advertising:
News content:
Social media:
Niche news:
After researching the strange story of a very wealthy, elderly American heiress, veteran Msnbc.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman decided to experiment with the presentation of his article. Rather than turn in a few thousand words of copy as usual, Dedman put together almost 50 photographs in a slideshow and accompanied them with captions.
The result, The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery, is not groundbreaking in its approach to storytelling, but the response to the story is testament to the power of visual reportage.
Dedman reported that he received 500 emails from readers about the story, more than he’s received about any other in his career, and it has had around 78 million page views, more than any other story on Msnbc.com.
Poynter’s Steve Myers has an interview with Dedman on the story at this link…
Courtesy of YouTube user MindElation, the clip below has been doing the rounds, but it’s worth a Friday viewing. The footage shows a US TV reporter losing his cool while presenting a live report – which his anchor later attributes to a technology failure. As the description says: “Every newscaster has similar things happen, but if they’re lucky it’s never captured on video.”
From last week (via Martin Stabe) but worth a mention: ESPN has a report on Mark Zuckerman, a US sports reporter who is supporting his site by reader donations.
Built on $20-60 donations, Zuckerman has raised more than $10,000 to support the site and cover his costs while working. Essentially ‘hired’ by his donors, he is particularly responsive to questions and feedback on the coverage from his audience and tries to answer readers’ queries with his reporting:
Like his patrons, Zuckerman is getting something extra: a rekindled passion for his work. While driving to Florida, he blogged from a roadside rest stop about the Nationals signing Ron Villone. During his first day at spring training, he broke news that probable starting pitcher Ross Detwiler would miss 10 weeks following surgery on a torn hip flexor. Without the space restrictions of a newspaper, Zuckerman can write what he wants when he wants to write it; with greater reader interaction, he can tailor his information for the people who value it most.