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Friday, March 15, 2002

Posted 11:31 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

The Winners Are ... El Mundo, El Mundo, ...

Steve Outing on the first SND.ies awards
The first monthly winners have been announced for the Society of News Design's "SND.ies," the new best-of-new-media competition. Awards were given in only two categories, though there were four awards. Best Breaking Multimedia went to El Mundo of Spain; and Best Non-breaking Multimedia also went to El Mundo, with a tie between three of that site's Flash projects. This isn't too surprising. El Mundo has been a world leader in producing multimedia infographics.

SND.ies organizer Laura Ruel says the contest has not yet attracted a lot of entries, and so some categories did not warrant issuing awards. If a category didn't attract outstanding work, no award was given. (That's not to take away from El Mundo, which certainly deserves the honors.) If your news site is doing ground-breaking multimedia Web work, enter. Awards are given monthly.
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Posted 11:09 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Google Does News

Barb Palser on search service's new baby
Check out Google's News Search, currently in beta. One trick that sets it apart from other news headline searches is its grouping technology, which sorts search results into clumps of closely related stories. It also seems to do a good job of culling redundant wire stories. To really appreciate these features, try searching a high-coverage term such as "Britney" on Yahoo! News and then do the same on Google News Search. According to a review on ResearchBuzz, Google News Search scrapes 100 sources hourly and goes back about seven days.
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Posted 2:25 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Preaching the Interactive Gospel

Steve Outing at an online journalism event
Here in Los Angeles at the Online Journalism Conference, first-day speakers (on Thursday) railed for more interactive content on news websites, and complained that the news industry is not committed enough to interactive journalism. From panelist (and E-Media Tidbits contributor) Nora Paul: "News sites right now are pretty damn boring." She preached the gospel of new interactive story-telling (or "story-making") forms. Held up as a model was speaker Rob Curley of Morris Communications, whose high energy has put Topeka, Kansas, on the media map. The Topeka Capital-Journal site is doing lots of impressive, original, local online content that you can't believe is coming from a newspaper that size. (Morris and Topeka cleaned up at the EPpy Awards last month.)

Some important stuff is being said at this conference. Unfortunately, I have the feeling it's a "preaching to the converted" event. I wish more old-media executives could hear these messages. (They could listen to the webcast.)
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Posted 1:52 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

New Look for OJR

Steve Outing on a journalism resource
Attendees of last night's opening dinner of the USC/UC Berkeley Online Journalism Conference were the first to see the new look of Online Journalism Review. OJR.org hasn't had a facelift in a long time, so Josh Fouts and Larry Pryor hired a design firm to add some pizzazz. Fouts says this is a soft launch, and feedback is being solicited before the design goes live on the full site. Cool new feature: "Speak Up" links in left columns of articles. When you post a comment, they turn up attached directly to the column in the left side. Pyror, USC's online journalism director, preaches interactivity, and this puts words into action.
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Posted 1:18 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

A Cool – and Simple – Idea

Rich Gordon on letting readers control font size
It's become routine now for websites to allow users to create printable versions or let them "e-mail to a friend." But the Weekly Standard has another feature/service that I haven't seen before. (I'm sure they weren't the first to do it, and maybe I just haven't noticed it elsewhere.) The Standard lets users increase font size on any story, with a single click. As an example, check out this story in the Standard on blogging. (OK, so now we have a blog referring readers to an article about blogging. ...) Anyway, given the number of people with high-resolution monitors (which results in tiny print), I think this is a great service. And, using Cascading Style Sheets (the Standard's approach), it's ridiculously easy to do. Kudos!
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Thursday, March 14, 2002

Posted 7:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

The EU Summit in Barcelona, Better in Flash

Eva Domínguez on covering a European meeting
The first day of the European Union summit in Barcelona (March 14-16) started as expected: European leaders discussing indoors, social movements outdoors, and some traffic chaos in a city "taken" by this event. Almost all Spanish newspapers are devoting specials reports online to this significant meeting, compiling news and opinions about it. Nevertheless, some things are better explained with the help of interactive graphics. El Mundo shows all the events, mass meetings, and security measures at one glance in Flash. Anyone who wants to claim against this summit can do so at El Periódico de Catalunya's claiming wall. Although Flash is not used this time, the protest is still very visual.
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Posted 11:15 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Swedish Newspaper Removes Online Forum

Katja Riefler on user-generated content
The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet usually is praised for its online edition, which is still the country's most visited website. Now it is in trouble. The site had to change the way it runs its discussion boards due to a court ruling that held editors responsible for death threats against Jews that were posted on the site in October 2000. "Tyck till" ("Your opinion") had always been a moderated discussion forum. But due to "technical problems," the newspaper did not intercept the material so troublesome posts appeared online "for some time" before being removed.

The Swedish constitution states that freedom of speech does not include the right to agitate against an ethnic group, and this was what the court felt was more important than the fact that the editor tried to remove the offending posts. The decision, which caused the newspaper to shut down its forums during non-business hours, fuels the discussion in Europe about whether the security interest of the state is more important or the free flow of information. (Have a look at a story by The Register.) In the last few months there have been some decisions that seem to shift the weight toward more government control.
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Posted 10:32 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Virtually Accused

Andrew Stroehlein on war crimes online
The Internet continues to be a battleground in the former Yugoslavia. As Drago Hedl explains in an article for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting this week, many wrongly accused of war crimes on various Internet sites are finding it difficult to have the false claims removed from the offening sites. Hedl describes the case of Radovan Krstic, one of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Croatia smeared as war criminals by Croatian nationalists on a Croatian website, and his problems in fighting to have the false information taken down. At issue, however, is more than just a simple libel case; this online material has serious political effects as well, creating an enviroment that pressures remaining Serbs in Croatia to leave and discourages expelled Serbs from returning.
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Posted 1:04 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Flash Content Can Be Great (I Say)

Steve Outing on Web storytelling techniques
As Juan C. Camus points out in the item directly below this, there's debate about whether multimedia Flash content on websites is a good or bad thing. I lean toward the former, since the vast majority of PCs these days are Flash-capable. An example of how Flash can be an outstanding storytelling tool is seen in the current Christian Science Monitor website Flash presentation, "Perspectives on Terrorism: Defining the Line." It's an effective use of still-image slide show and audio voiceovers. Definitely an online story-telling example to examine and learn from. My only quibble is that some audio clips brought up the Windows Media Player, instead of the entire presentation being contained in Flash; that's awkward. (Thanks to Poynter colleague Chip Scanlan for bringing this to my attention.)
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Posted 12:48 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Jakob Nielsen in Flash (Gasp!)

Juan C. Camus on Flash usability
You may have read what usability expert Jakob Nielsen thinks about Flash: He says the use of the interactive content creation technology from Macromedia is 99% bad. In his words: "About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease." Well, a group of Web designers from Argentina worked over that column from Nielsen and published a Spanish translation using Flash technology, on the website of Arancibia.com. The novelty is in the presentation, because Flash allowed them to put "sticky notes" on Nielsen's words and counter what he says with their own thinking about Flash's pros and cons.
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Wednesday, March 13, 2002

Posted 8:25 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Media Consolidation – Facts and Thoughts

Rich Gordon on the implications for quality journalism
Journalists and media critics like Ben Bagdikian have been fretting for years about the impact of media consolidation on quality journalism and the diversity of voices and opinions represented in the media. These concerns have been accentuated by the newsroom cutbacks imposed recently by publicly traded media companies. But a new article from McKinsey Quarterly provides some useful perspective: Worldwide, there are still more than 100 media companies with more than $1 billion in revenues. The media industry is much less consolidated than other businesses such as aerospace and pharmaceuticals. The article suggests that the big players are jostling for position in hopes of turning new digital media into new streams of cash. All of this raises some questions in my mind:

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Posted 8:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Cookie Cutters and Brain Drain

Steve Outing on online news employment
Recently, I ran across a couple of smart, veteran new-media people I know who in one case had left a newspaper company after many years, and in the second case is poised to leave. I'm not going to disclose their identities for privacy reasons, but their respective reasons for saying good-bye were because their companies at the corporate level had decided to adopt "cookie-cutter" Web publishing systems. Both individuals parted ways with their employers because they didn't want to work in an environment where there would be modest opportunity to develop creative newspaper websites — because of corporate constraints on design and services offered by each site in the chain.

While this is obviously anecdotal, I can't help but think that corporate-level decisions to buy into cookie-cutter Web publishing systems are resulting in a "brain drain" for some newspaper companies that have decided that all their sites need to look alike.
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Posted 3:26 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

The President Is Online

Juan C. Camus on use of video chat
Beginning this Thursday (March 14), the principal authorities of the Chilean government, starting with President Ricardo Lagos, will be online on a video chat on the website of the Chilean version of Spanish portal Terra. The idea is to have as a guest one member of the Cabinet every week, to allow them to speak in real time with the users of the website. This experience has been going on since 2001, when some 10,000 people took part in the chats. Even in the first video chat with Lagos, in January 2001, about 500 users took part. In the next video chats, users will have the chance to read the words as well as see the video and listen to the president over the Internet.
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Posted 12:11 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

'A Revolution in Storytelling'

Rich Gordon on MSNBC's multimedia journalism
Brian Storm of MSNBC.com makes a compelling pitch for what he calls "made-for-the-medium storytelling" in online journalism. He writes about the kinds of work done by MSNBC.com's multimedia team, which he calls "National Public Radio meets documentary photojournalism." He argues that photojournalists should start carrying audio recorders — and that most photojournalists don't need to learn video. MSNBC's goal, he says, is to mix high-quality video with documentary photography and "This American Life"-style audio. "If we can integrate the very best of these storytelling formats, we can produce an experience that will put journalism at the forefront of new media," he says. I think he is absolutely on target — not only because this kind of journalism takes advantage of the unique capabilities of new media, but also because any traditional news organization can produce it with only a modest investment in equipment and additional training.
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Posted 11:23 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

China Feeling Cut Off Over Spam

Andrew Stroehlein on the road
The English-language China Central Television (CCTV) reports that Chinese spam is causing particular concern here. Apparently, many servers in the West are blocking e-mails originating in China due to spam from proxy servers here. Nothing unique to China in that; the problem is that the blocking is hitting such a wide spectrum of servers in China that many legitimate businesses are starting to complain that their own e-mails are also blocked. CCTV interviewed businessmen in China who claim to have lost business because their e-mails were rejected by servers connecting them to their Western customers and clients. The root cause seems to be that Chinese regional servers are not as thorough about monitoring and killing spam as elsewhere in the world.
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Posted 9:31 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

BBC Advances TV on the Web

Steve Outing on Internet video
The BBC will begin to make its daily TV news bulletins available on the Web, as The Guardian's Owen Gibson reports. It has signed deals to provide the news and sports video and audio content — news bulletins on demand and the top eight BBC news stories of the day, enhanced with video content such as extended interviews and speeches — to two broadband providers, Blueyonder and Freeserve. It's part of the BBC's strategy to move toward interactive broadcasting on the Internet and creating a "broadband Britain." But this is not without controversy; there are concerns that the UK public broadcaster could hurt commercial news competitors with this move.
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Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Posted 5:28 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

CTRs: Down, Down, Down ... Up!

Steve Outing on online advertising
Overall clickthrough rates (CTRs) on Web advertising have experienced a long slide downward since banner ads were introduced to the Web in the mid 1990s. They're still in the toilet — less than 1% of website users click on ads — but for the first time they've begun to climb upward. According to Doubleclick CEO Kevin Ryan, speaking at Venture Reporter's CEO Spotlight event in New York, CTRs as measured by his company have inched up to 0.76% as of March this year (up from under 0.5%). Part of the reason: website publishers are putting fewer ads on each page, so each ads gets more attention from users. (Rafat Ali reports on Ryan's talk for VentureReporter.net; registration required.)
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Posted 3:54 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

AJR.org: Someday Our Redesign Will Come

Steve Outing on online magazines
You may have noticed that the website for American Journalism Review has been absent for the last several months. A brief announcement states, "We're putting the finishing touches on our redeveloped site. ..." It seems odd to many in the journalism world that one of the profession's leading magazines does not have any Web presence. When I asked AJR editor Rem Reider today when the site would reappear, he responded, "I think and hope the answer to your question is 'very soon.' We've had the site redesigned, and the process has taken quite a bit longer than anyone dreamed."

AJR used to have a Web partnership with Eric Meyer's Newslink site; Meyer maintained Newslink's directory of media websites, and selected AJR content was published on the site. AJR and Newslink parted ways last November.
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Posted 3:41 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

New Trend: Mobile Gaming

Katja Riefler on the start of UMTS in Europe
For the next eight days, nerds in Germany will gather in Hannover at CEBIT, the biggest trade show for information and telecommunications technology in Europe. Although for the first time in its history there will be fewer vendors than the previous year, those that are attending are more optimistic. The most important trend seems to be broadband entertainment and mobile gaming. Germany's biggest ISP, T-Online (belonging to Deutsche Telekom), will launch its new broadband portal, "T-Vision," during the fair.

The second big hope is mobile entertainment. I-mode will come to Germany in April, and UMTS will follow in autumn, according to various press releases. Analysts doubt this schedule: there already is a delay in building the mobile network infrastructure and there are not enough attractive UMTS phones available yet. Many German publishers are prepared to provide mobile content on the new platform. But due to their sobering experiences with paid SMS services and WAP content, no one expects to make money soon.
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Posted 11:26 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Whither Sept. 11 Screen Shots?

Steve Outing on archiving Web history
Following the Sept. 11 U.S. terror attacks, fellow E-Media Tidbits writer Norbert Specker set up a website to feature archived screen shots of online news sites on Sept. 11 and 12. Norbert reports that on the six-month anniversary (yesterday), some 4,000 people visited the pages.

The site includes some 180 news sites' Sept. 11/12 home pages, but as Norbert notes, the majority of news sites are missing from the line-up. Why is that? In many cases, it's because sites didn't save copies of what they published on those days — the most important days in the history of the Internet. "That to me seems to be a clear statement on exactly how little importance most news media are putting on their news effort as an extension of their role in society," he says. If you'd like to prove him wrong, send your Sept. 11/12 screen shots to master@taktik.ch.
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Monday, March 11, 2002

Posted 7:54 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Courting the College Crowd

Norbert Specker on newspapers and education
A new spin on NIE (Newspapers in Education) is reported by At New York. The New York Times is teaming up with McGraw-Hill Higher Education and will provide headline news to M-H textbook-related websites and also offer discounted subscriptions to the newspaper and its archives. Links will be pointing to this co-branded page.
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Posted 7:45 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Salon Gets a Little More Bread

Steve Outing on webzine's struggle for profitability
Perpetually beleaguered Salon.com has received another $500,000 investment from software maker Adobe Systems — which was one of the initial funders of the news, culture, and politics webzine back in 1995. This makes for the fifth round of investments by Adobe in Salon. The e-publisher still maintains that it can turn a profit sometime this year. (Internet.com reports.)
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Posted 4:05 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

A Spreading Population

Norbert Specker on operating systems
The Penguin is colonizing European parliaments. In the latest development, the German Bundestag decided to switch to Linux servers by 2003 (vote by the lower house). Despite intensive lobbying efforts by Microsoft, the parliament cited independence from a single provider and long-term savings as key reasons. The move is expected to influence similar decision-making processes on regional and local governmental levels, reports the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Claiming independence once was a time-honored activity in the media industry, as it never was shy to see long-term profits — so maybe the Penguin will find other mating grounds sooner than expected.
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Posted 12:04 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

The Internet Saves a Book

Steve Outing on the power of online
Saturday evening here in Boulder (Colorado), my wife and I attended a speech/book-signing by Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker ("Roger and Me"), author, and liberal provocateur. Among his entertaining stories was the one about how his latest book, "Stupid White Men," almost got dumped by his publisher, HarperCollins, but was saved by the Internet, and became a national best-seller.

Briefly, the story goes: 1) Moore writes ultra-liberal book; 2) Sept. 11 happens; 3) publisher says tone of book is wrong for post-Sept. 11 America, asks for rewrite; 4) Moore refuses; 5) dejected author reads a couple chapters to small audience, tells publisher story; 6) librarian in audience gets on Internet and spreads word to other librarians; 7) word spreads and angry librarians inundate publisher with nasty e-mails; 8) publisher relents and agrees to small press run, tiny book tour; 9) book sales go crazy, hitting No. 1 on Amazon.com and climbing to No. 3 on New York Times bestseller list. Lesson: don't underestimate the influence of people empowered by the Internet.
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Posted 11:17 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Credibility Group to Include Online

Steve Outing on the mainstreaming of new media
Online media is pretty much mainstream these days (at least in most developed countries). But there's still the issue of online media getting the respect within the journalism profession of other "old-media" formats (newspapers, TV, et al). Here's another indication that online is getting closer to being the equal of traditional media: the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) National Credibility Roundtables Project has expanded its scope this year to include both broadcast and online news organizations. In this project, APME and newspapers in 49 U.S. states host local discussions with readers in order to "build trust in the important work of journalism."
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Posted 10:49 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Disney to Deliver Wireless Content in Korea, Taiwan

Madan Rao on mobile communications
Disney is developing mobile game services under the ESPN sports brand using Qualcomm's BREW technology to deploy the games to mobile users. Walt Disney Internet Group and SK Telecom of South Korea have created a content arrangement that will bring Disney Mobile branded wireless content to Korean consumers by mid 2002. The Disney Mobile service will be offered on SKT's NATE portal service, featuring cartoon logos, screen-savers, ring tones, and streaming video. SK Telecom, the largest mobile operator in Korea, provides cellular services to about 16 million Korean subscribers. Walt Disney's Internet Group also has signed an agreement with Taiwan Cellular Corporation to distribute Disney wireless content under the Disney Mobile brand over TCC's wireless network in Taiwan, which reaches close to 8 million subscribers.
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