links for 2009-12-02
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Pulitzer or community – daddy or chips?
Last night I was part a debate on the regional press at City University.
Near the end, talk moved on to the subject of journalism enterprise.
When asked for a show of hands, most of the students said they would like to work in the mainstream media. Eighteen out of approx. 70 in the room said they wanted to work for a start-up.
I said I expected it would be those 18 that would be employed by mainstream media organisations. I guess, for me, the skills priority for journalists has changed.
It reminded me of a hypothetical situation someone put to me the other day:
You are the editor of a newspaper. You are allowed to employ one more person. You can choose either a writer that has won a Pulitzer prize or a writer that has built an online community of 40,000 highly committed readers and contributors. Which do you choose?
I know nothing is ever that clear cut, of course. This is a real “daddy or chips” question. Yet, I guess how you answer it gives a good indication of how you think we should train our journalists of the future.
links for 2009-11-30
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"The messages – drawn from ‘text pagers’ carried by people in an official capacity – range from snap news reports to messages between members of essential services as well as expressions of support for loved ones. They were, Wikileaks said, “a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time.”"
links for 2009-11-29
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"…I did almost consider surrendering to popular pressure and dedicating an entire column to my analysis of whether such an arrangement is ever likely to happen and what it would mean for Google, and the wider world. But then I realised that I’m paid to write long, and that a column like that would read as follows (in its entirety)… Will News Corp Remove Its Content From Google, And If So What Will It Mean For The World? No. And nothing. …which feels lazy, even for me."
links for 2009-11-26
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seven half-hearted articles a week does not equal one very polished, interesting article.
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The art of geocoding addresses in the UK, as I previously explained, is a soul-destroying process, frought with inaccuracy, bugs and convoluted workarounds.
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'10 Days' is a study of news headlines taken from the BBC News Online between May 6-15th, 2009.
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"Nonetheless, the principle does not strike me as far-fetched, even if we have yet to find whether he can pull it off. If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?"
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"Consumers with an iPhone show more willingness to pay for digital content than the wider online population, according to research published today, although the chances of getting people to pay for newspaper content on the web are still slim."
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Regional newspaper publisher Johnston Press will erect paywalls at six of its weekly paper websites from next Monday. According to chief executive John Fry, it is a small-scale trial to assess the impact of charging for content.
links for 2009-11-25
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What makes pretending to be an elf more profitable than publishing news and information online? Maybe newspapers could learn a few things from the world of games as they try to monetise digital behaviour…
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"You don't like the readers talking back – because they have innumerable methods to respond to your work, whether or not you have comments on articles"
links for 2009-11-24
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"…people are increasingly likely to discuss and interact with content away from the site where it was originally posted. Grigorik studied 1,000 of the feeds his company has monitored for the past three years and found that about 60 percent of the interactions PostRank recorded happened on sites other than where the content was originally posted. "As a publisher or blogger, I want to see these conversations," he says. "
links for 2009-11-23
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"Members of Facebook, the social network, have more conversations about brands than the typical US consumer, be it on the web or offline, a new study has found."
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"These comparative country figures are based on Purchasing Power Parities, a system that uses the US dollar as a base point, and eliminates the different price levels between countries that typically result from currency conversion."
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"Forecasts from ABI Research predict the value of this market will rise from $6 million (€4.0m; £3.6m) in 2008 to $350m in 2014, with around half of this figure being generated by mobile ads."
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"Being a new newspaper, part of a new brand, gives I the freedom to experiment and it seems that this freedom has been passed on to all the staff. Mrozowski and Bello were extremely enthusiastic about their working environment and what it allows them to do. "There's this motivating feeling," Bello said. Mrozowski said that the two senior editors, Figueiredo and André Macedo, "have imparted this feeling of accomplishing the impossible at every step… There is no cap to how big these guys will dream and it presses you to do things that you wouldn't do at another newspaper."
links for 2009-11-19
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Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems.
links for 2009-11-18
"Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot."
""Pledging to "rewrite the economics of newspapers", Harding said the Times would charge for 24-hour access to that day's edition of the paper alongside a subscription model, but dismissed the idea of micro-payments for individual articles.
After announcing late last month that it would create the role of Social Media Editor, the BBC has appointed Alex Gubbay as the first to fill the position.