Tag Archives: USA

USA Today links up with AOL for instant messaging service

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USA Today is hoping to tap into users of AOL’s instant messaging service AIM with the launch of a real-time news alert system for the service this week.

Users will also be able to search current and archived USA Today headlines through the feature, while the keyword alert service will supply a headline, article summary and link back to the complete story in an instant message.

Another means of distribution for the paper’s content and method of reaching new audiences, says USA Today’s publisher Jeff Webber in a press release.

ESPN in video content deal with AOL.com

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ESPN has made its first online content deal to provide video content to AOL.com.

Clips from the sports site will appear in an ESPN channel and will be viewed via an embedded video player.

The video will also be searchable on the internet portal’s site. The player will offer links to ESPN.com content related to the clips.

According to a press release from the company, in 2007 ESPN.com videos were viewed 1.2 billion times.

WSJ: Katie Couric poised to leave CBS News

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The CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is likely to leave the broadcaster long before her contract expires, according to CBS executives.

Couric, who joined CBS in June 2006, is only halfway through a five-year contract, but has struggled to pull in viewers – the programme has seen record ratings lows in the last two years.

Social Media Journalist: ‘Services like ustream or qik that live stream video from DV cams and phones have huge potential’ Damon Kiesow

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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, Damon Kiesow, Nashua Telegraph.

image of Damon Kiesow

1. Who are you and what do you do?
I am the Managing Editor/Online at The Telegraph in Nashua, NH. I am responsible for the overall news presentation and strategy for our digital publications including NashuaTelegraph.com, NHPrimary.com, FeastNH.com and EncoreBuzz.com.

We have a staff of about 50 in the newsroom and nashuatelegraph.com was a finalist in two categories in this year’s Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge Awards.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
On a typical day:

I use each for a variety of reasons. Delicious is my reigning favourite due to the huge filtering and early warning effect it provides. I follow about 78 people, mostly digital media professionals.

A few times per day I review their most recent bookmarks to keep up to date on what they are thinking about and what new tools and toys they have discovered.

I know many of them do the same and some of my ‘best’ ideas we have implemented at the paper have come from those bookmarks.

Twitter serves a similar purpose – and I am following many of the same people as on Delicious. But I like Twitter for the flexibility (IM, phone, PC, Web) and both the immediacy and asynchronous nature of the service.

It is just a great way to stay in touch with people without the burden of reading or responding to email or phone calls.

I use Ning mostly every day to visit sites like wiredjournalists.com, and we have created several Ning sites for the newspaper including Encorebuzz.ning.com.

I have been on LinkedIn for 5 – 6 years and it is still the best place to accumulate business contacts. I probably do not use it every day, but a few times a week I get requests to connect.

Facebook is one I use just due to the critical mass of people they have online. I check it every day and we do have a few small applications running on the service that feed out breaking news from the newspaper. Most of my time there is spent ignoring Zombie and Pirate invitations.

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 a news gathering tool?
If I had to choose from just the tools I use regularly – I would pick Twitter. They have really focused on a core concept and seem very open to letting people expand on it.

It is too early to say if Twitter will be a huge hit for us as a newspaper but we pick up a few followers a week and the trend seems to be increasing.

I like the fact that we can use it both simply to push content (using twitterfeed.com) and as a two-way conversation with readers. We follow anyone who follows us and try to be responsive to questions or comments that come in via our Twitter friends.

In terms of other products – I think the most likely winners this year will be services like ustream.tv or qik.com that allow live streaming video from DV cameras and cell phones respectively.

This has huge potential both as a newsgathering tool and as a social media/self publishing phenomena. We are just starting to experiment with both of these services.

4. And the most overrated in your opinion?
At the moment I consider Facebook to be the most overrated. Things are beginning to change but it is still a walled garden for the most part.

I would not be comfortable investing a lot time or effort in using Facebook as a social media platform for the newspaper without some continued opening up of their API and clarification of their terms of service.

Gawker: America’s pernicious Pulitzers

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‘The Pulitzers aren’t going to finance American journalism; in fact, one can make the argument that these self-congratulating awards, and the attention devoted to them, are symptomatic of the decline of the newspaper industry.’

So says Gawker of America’s premier press awards in a characteristically pithy piece of commentary.

But pith isn’t the sole aim, this well aimed jab strikes at the exposed underbelly of the US press and scores a good point.

‘Newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge.

‘Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet.

‘Pulitzer-winning journalism will win Pulitzers; it won’t save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines in advertising revenue.’

Nodding agreement here.

Innovations in Journalism – Instant Journalist

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s flat-packed news websites ready for easy assembly and use from Instant Journalist.

image of instant journalist website

1.  Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Scott Durham, president of Instivate. We’re a small software company in Seattle, Washington building a flexible, scalable platform for powering online communities.

Our first product is Instant Journalist, which makes it easy for anyone to launch their own online news communities where the public can read and contribute news stories and events of local interest with rich media such as video, images, and documents.

2.  Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Since anyone can join and submit content to a site powered by Instant Journalist, it allows the site to cover a much wider range of news events than an individual or team of journalists could do alone.

We have an advanced set of content rating tools, automated algorithms, and editorial controls that makes it easy for the site owner to manage the content from thousands of individual contributors, and make sure that the best content rises to the top of the heap.

In addition, we have a variety of features that aren’t available in traditional blogging or other content management systems.

One key strength is that our product comes with native support for video. That makes it easy for anyone to upload video of a news event and make it available to readers of the site. Our system handles all the complexity of video processing and conversion behind the scenes, and then allows playback on any web browser.

Another key feature includes our integrated mapping technology, where any story can be placed on a map and assigned to a specific geographical neighbourhood, town, or city.

This allows users to quickly visualise the location of a news event and browse and discover other content in that specific area. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds for specific geographic locations and track the news around them at a very local level.

3.  Is this it, or is there more to come?
Our major focus now is the delivery of a self-service advertising solution that will make it easy for site owners to monetise their site.

It will allow any advertiser to easily sign-up and create ads for the site. Also stay tuned as we roll out more advanced content management features and more interactive ways of reporting news events on the site.

4.  Why are you doing this?
We’re passionate about building systems that make it easy for people to participate in and contribute to communities of like-minded people online.

We picked the news space as our first project because there’s a huge opportunity there to empower professional journalists and regular members of the public to collaborate online and cover a much wider range of news than has ever been possible before.

5.  What does it cost to use it?
We have a range of packages that scale up according to the amount of traffic a site serves, starting at just $18 a month.

It’s designed so that a site can start small, with pricing that grows as the site does and at a very affordable rate.

6.  How will you make it pay?
Our content management system makes it easy for site owners to plug any 3rd-party advertising solution into their site, such as Google ads, etc.  And our forthcoming self-service advertising solution will take that to the next level by allowing access to a wider range of potential advertisers, and providing the site owner a higher percentage of overall revenue than other 3rd party online advertising solutions.

Have a look at Centraldistrictnews.com – it covers a neighbourhood here in Seattle and allows people to communicate with their neighbours about the news that happens right around them.

We’re also working with a major newspaper company to adapt our platform to a wide range of less newsy applications; covering topics from travel to sports and local dining we’re allowing them to quickly deploy niche interest sites and other targeted online communities that will build a rich online ecosystem of websites around their existing newspaper brands.

NYT: CBS considers outsourcing reporting to CNN

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Senior executives at have told the New York Times that CBS TV news, one of the leading news broadcasters in the US, is mulling over a possible deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN.

Tlaks about such plans aren’t new, says the report, however recently they have intensified to detail how CBS would ditch its news-gathering capacity but keep its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor.

It would then take a feed from CNN and pay it regular fees.

Another possibility would see CBS hang on to some reporters in key regions but pair them with CNN crews.

Innovations in Journalism – HappyJournalist

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It’s almost a daily occurrence to hear about the perilous state of the news industry (remember AngryJournalist.com anyone?) so Praise Be and Hallelujah for Joe Murphy and his HappyJournalist blog.

Each week we give developers the opportunity to tell us why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on – this week Joe tells us about the site he developed to celebrate what’s good about working as a journalist.

image of happy journalist website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Joe Murphy. I’m a reporter-turned-web designer-turned-web developer. My day job is as the senior developer for The Denver Post’s website. I build and maintain web apps, fix stuff, and do other tech-type-stuff.

In my hobby-time I build and maintain a handful of sites, apps and blogs … HappyJournalist is one of them.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Well, it’s not a particularly useful site. Fun, yes. Useful, no.

HappyJournalist is a lens on journalists who have something to say, like what they do, and feel comfortable typing and clicking the submit button on the blog.

Until we get to the point where the internet has tools to quantify and publish emotion-related information, HappyJournalist will be a semi-static repository of what was said by the folk who have something to say.

That ‘until’ is a big, big ‘until’.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
I’ve been exploring that ‘What’s Next’ idea and have listed some other ideas (MildlyEnthusiasticJournalist.com and DrunkJournalist.com are my favourites, and a few people have contributed their own).

To make this interesting and forward thinking I’m considering pitching a new micro-format that describes emotions.

There’s no good way to aggregate or publish emotion-based information online yet. Seems like that’s a big gap in the web, don’t you think?

The internet’s gears turn because the robots and computers turn the gears, but it’s the humans that make the internet come alive and sparkle.

4) Why are you doing this?
Fun, conversation, curiosity. AngryJournalist started the dialogue, and it would be a shame to let this “I am a journalist and I have feelings” thread die after the first salvo.

5) What does it cost to use it?
It’s free, it will always be free.

6) How will you make it pay?
I won’t — it cost me 90 minutes and eight bucks to create this, so I don’t have a huge stake in getting that time or money back.

Folio: US newspaper company, Tribune Co, launches magazine just for Kindle

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US newspaper company Tribune is launching a second digital magazine exclusively for the Amazon Kindle ebook reader – a week after launching its first magazine of this kind.

A week after launching Opinionated, a political magazine aimed just at Kindle owners, Tribune has launched its second Kindle-specific title – a daily electronic magazine focused on pop culture – after partnering with PopMatters.com.

According to Folio, the magazine is targeting 18-to-34-year-olds and is available for a free 14-day free trial and $1.49 monthly subscription at Amazon.com.

Washington Post wins record six Pulitzer Prizes

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The Washington Post scooped a record six award at last night’s Pulitzer Prize ceremony including the Breaking News prize for its ‘multi-faceted’ online and print coverage of last April’s Virginia Tech shootings.

As the tragedy unfolded, the Washington Post covered the event in print and in multimedia online, providing what the Pulitzer Board described as ‘exceptional coverage’.

The Post provided profiles of each of the 32 victims as well as the killer, Seung-Hui Cho, and wrote about the failure of the university’s mental health services to react to warning signs or help Cho.

It also won prizes for public service, feature writing, national reporting, international affairs and commentary.