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.
John Hassell, online editor at the Star-Ledger newspaper, has posted pictures of the Ledger’s newsroom as it prepares for its new webcast news show.
The noon bulletin, which will be launched this summer, is being developed with help from Michael Rosenblum, who helped build Current.tv.
Check out Hassell’s pics on Flickr.
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 New York Times has developed a digital archive of all volumes of the paper from 1851 to 1922.
Beginning with the first ever edition on September 18 1851, the TimesMachine displays entire editions of the paper which can be scanned page by page or as thumbnails.
A sample of the archive is available to all users, but only home delivery subscribers and libraries have unlimited access.
BusinessWeek.com has looked to data from its web traffic to update a story originally published in 2005 (pointed out by The Bivings Report).
After seeing that their article ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business‘ was continuing to attract significant traffic, authors Stephen Baker and Heather Green decided the demand for the information meant an updated version was necessary.
“Type in ‘blogs business’ on the search engine, and our story comes up first among the results, as of this writing. Hundreds of thousands of people are still searching ‘blogs business’ because they’re eager to learn the latest news about an industry that’s changing at warp speed. Their attention maintains our outdated relic at the top of the list. It’s self-perpetuating: They want new, we give them old,” wrote Baker and Green.
The article has not only been given the new headline ‘Social Media Will Change Your Business‘, but now features annotations and updates from experts.
An editor’s note at the top of the revised piece openly explains this strategy (emphasis is mine):
“When we published ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business’ in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn’t see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.
“So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we’ve been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We’ve placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story.
“First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter-they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It’s clunkier language than blogs, but we’re not putting it on the cover anyway. We’re just fixing it.”
The original version still exists on the site, but directs readers to the updated piece. The writers have also been using their blog on the site to gain feedback from readers on what should be changed.
So that’s re-optimising the article for search engines, meeting the demands of readers and promoting the site as an up-to-the minute information source, all rolled into one.
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.
The Washington Examiner has named Mary Katharine Ham as online editor for the paper’s soon-to-be launched website – dcexaminer.com.
Ham, who will take up the new post on June 10, joins the Examiner from online political community Townhall.com, where she was managing editor.
“Her [Ham’s] hiring demonstrates again our commitment to building a great news and information company that excels in three channels, including newspapers, online and video,” Vivienne Sosnowski, editorial director of Clarity Media, which publishes the Examiner, said on the site.
The Wall Street Journal has added a new section to its site for women in business.
Journal Women – aimed at ‘ambitious professional and executive women’ – will feature discussion boards, a blog, video content and online polls.
The new section comes after Forbes.com announced plans earlier this week of a social network for female business executives.
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The Los Angeles Times has integrate its print and web picture desks and video operations into a new visual journalism department.
The move is the next phase in the Times’ alignment of its web and print operations, which will see mergers across the continuous news desk and main metro news desk this month.
The new department will be headed by Colin Crawford, who has been promoted to deputy managing editor for photography.
“Combining these three departments under the umbrella of visual journalism will improve our ability to present multimedia storytelling in an even more engaging way, and take greater advantage of our outstanding photo staff,” editor Ross Stanton said in a memo to staff.
Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.
I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).
Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).
Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.
External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.
The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.
As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.
This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.
In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog – like the Times’ sub-site – draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.
Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.
The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.