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Posted 10:58 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Toto, We're Still in Kansas
Steve Outing on a new media star
Rob Curley could probably work anywhere he wants, but he's chosen to stay in Kansas for his latest career move. The multi-award-winning newspaper new media manager (a frequent visitor to the podium at award presentations by the Newspaper Association of America and Editor & Publisher in recent years) is interviewed by E&P in "Rob Curley: King Of the World — The Journey From Topeka to Lawrence." The sites he's led are different, creative, and make money. Curley's thoughts are worth a listen.
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Posted 7:22 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
David Carlson: New Media Hero
Steve Outing on an academic appointment
Hurrah for David Carlson, an E-Media Tidbits contributor and director of the Interactive Media Lab at the University of Florida. Dave's been given a James M. Cox Jr. Foundation/The Palm Beach Post Professorship in New Media Journalism at UF. Dave is one of online news' pioneers, dating back to 1990 when he was founding editor of the Electronic Trib at the Albuquerque Tribune (New Mexico). Something you may not know: he's also a frequently published food and wine critic. Congratulations, Dave!
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Posted 12:37 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Hearing From the Homeless
Steve Outing on hosted weblogs
A while back in this weblog I touted the idea of news publishers hosting the weblogs of citizens and community groups. (Dave Winer is the biggest promoter of this concept, and his company Userland is entering into some deals to support this concept.) Well, I just discovered the weblog of "The Homeless Guy," which was started by Kevin Barbieux in August, and written from public library computers. (USAToday.com noticed his blog this week.) Barbieux writes well, and his weblog is a great read. It reminded me that the citizen weblog hosting concept can bring some interesting and different content to a news site — giving voice to those you don't normally encounter but are worth hearing. Think about it.
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Posted 12:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Best Positioned for the Mobile Internet
Eva Domínguez on technology-development research
The future development of the Internet will rely on the penetration of third-generation mobile phones, those ready to transmit video images together with a high-bandwidth connection to the Internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Therefore, those countries with a great use of both mobile phones and the Internet will be in better shape to face the challenges of the mobile World Wide Web.The ITU has evaluated 200 economies. The first five positions are for Hong Kong (China), Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA, in that order. Spain (my home) is 26th. The organization points out that "there are many low, lower-middle, and upper-middle income economies doing much better than their relative GDP per capita would lead one to expect."
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Posted 12:02 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
CNN.com's New Look
Steve Outing on a high-profile redesign
CNN.com debuted a new site design this week. In general, I find it more pleasing and easier to navigate, and a bit less sterile, than the old look. A cool new feature is an alert of significant headlines, which will appear on any page of the site as news breaks. A feature that sounds nice is "User Picks," a real-time monitor of the 10 most popular stories on the site based on what users are choosing to read. Alas, I cannot find this feature as I look Friday morning. Perhaps it's being buggy and is temporarily off-line. What do you think of the new design? Click the "Discuss" link below.
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Posted 11:24 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Would You Pay for Gossip Online?
Eva Domínguez on paid subscriptions
The group of media outlets charging for online content in Spain is steadily growing. The most recent one is the magazine devoted to gossip and stars' lives, ¡Hola!. The site has begun to charge for last-minute news, special articles and interviews, videos, and chats with famous people, among other services. Will readers pay for it? Who knows. The online magazine has been until now one of the most visited in Spain, counting more than 1.6 million users and 22 milion page-views in July.
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Posted 7:12 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Another Reason to Dislike Filters
Steve Outing on a threat to online publishing
I've written about the threat that spam filters present to ethical online publishers. Now comes another filter threat. According to this report from Reuters, an increasing number of companies are preventing workers from accessing news sites on their work computers — adding the news category to existing filters that block pornography and gambling sites. The rationale: workers are wasting company time reading the news online.If this trend catches on, it's really bad news for the online news industry. Office workers are one of the most lucrative audiences for news websites. Online news has been the one form of media that can reach people when they're at work. It will be a shame — not to mention an economic disaster for the online media industry — if workers are blocked in significant numbers from accessing news sites. (From the company perspective, I don't really see a benefit by preventing workers from being well informed. It strikes me as a short-sighted policy to ban employees from reading the news.)
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Posted 6:52 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Where's the Revenue Growth? Online
Peter M. Zollman on the media business
Here are the numbers from one newspaper company that reported its August revenues today: Total ad revenue, down 1% (from year-earlier numbers); classified revenue, down 3.7%, with employment down 14.1% and offsetting increases in auto and real estate; national advertising, up 5%; circulation revenue, up 1.6%. And — oh, yes — online revenue, UP 23%.This happens to be Lee Enterprises, one of the smartest U.S. newspaper companies when it comes to selling online services. And online revenue is still small, in relative terms. But other companies are reporting similar numbers. Where is newspaper company revenue growth coming from? Even in the "dot-com bust" days? From online. So why have so many newspaper companies curtailed their sales efforts, content efforts, creativity, and thinking about the brightest spot in their revenue picture?
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Posted 1:32 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'Editors? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Editors!'
Steve Outing on the new Google News
Search star Google has improved Google News, which selects the top stories of the day, categorizes them, and provides links to various news websites' articles. According to a note on the site: "There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement. ... The headlines that appear on our home page are selected entirely by a mathematical algorithm, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the Web."Over on his weblog, Adrian Holovaty opines that this technology is awesome — but not yet perfect. He writes: "I suspect many in the journalism world will be quick to criticize. Some — likely those with backgrounds in editing — will decry the lack of human judgment in the site's story selection. Others will hasten to remove their sites from the search engine's indexing, claiming Google's deep links will cut the number of users who access their sites' home pages directly — with Google, in effect, removing the middleman (news sites) between users and the individual news stories they want to read. But deep inside, operators of news websites will panic. If you listen closely, you just might start hearing the screams."
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Posted 1:11 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Thumbnails? A New Way of Searching
David Carlson on the future of finding information
A whole new way of searching the Web may be on the horizon. Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center, formerly Xerox PARC, have come up with a "visualization technique" that would present Web search results as thumbnail images. When a search term is entered, the search engine returns a set of small screen shots. Keywords within the document are blown up to large size within the screen shot, giving one a feel for how relevant the document's text may be to the search. The thumbnails are active links, meaning one click takes you to the page. A demo is available on the PARC website. The site reports that participants in a study were able to find information an average of 29% faster with Enhanced Thumbnail than with conventional text search results.
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Posted 10:05 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Slow Road to Paid Subscriptions
Steve Outing on online business models
A PR rep for WeatherBug, a year-old Internet weather service that has both free and paid versions, wrote to boast that 35,000 people have paid to subscribe ($19.95 annually) in the last year. Not bad, but look at the free numbers: WeatherBug is used by 13 million users. (Count me as one.) I'll save you doing the math: paid subscribers are 0.3% of the total user base for WeatherBug.Here's what this tells me: subscriptions for such online content services can, in time, grow to a decent revenue stream, but don't bet the farm on it anytime soon. WeatherBug's strategy is fine. What's not so wise are those sites (especially some newspapers) that decide to make their entire content paid-subscriber-only.
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Posted 9:27 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Here's a Concept: Register at a Website, by Fax!
Peter M. Zollman on collecting user data, with a twist
So I thought I might win a CD with highlights of Les Miserables for registering at the New York Daily News website — although I seriously doubted that I'd be among the first 200 people to sign up. (Somehow, I suspect they got their first 200 sign-ups weeks or months ago. If they did, would the contest qualify as false or deceptive advertising? It would in my book.) Anyway, I started to fill out the form, and then did a doubletake. Believe it or not, there's no "Submit" button (or equivalent). That's right: it said, "Fill out the form below completely, and fax it to: 212-210-1777." Now that's a technologically forward-thinking website! I'm sure retyping all those faxes into the customer database will be another time-saver at this progressive company, as well. At least they had a privacy policy on the site.
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Posted 6:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Future Sounds Strange, Yet Cool
Steve Outing on media gadgets coming our way
As part of my job of reporting on the digital media world, I enjoy the opportunity to contemplate how media consumption will change in the years ahead. A website called ExtremeTech has published a fascinating article that got me thinking further out than usual. Dave Salvator reports on technologies that are "a lot closer than you think" for flexible computer displays — concepts that will free online content and journalism from the confines of the PC screen. Writes Salvator: "But what if your next laptop computer could look like ... a box of plastic food wrap?"Flexible computers have some obvious applications — such as a magazine-size tablet with which to read digital versions of print content (Time magazine) and interactive content (NYTimes.com), and can be rolled up like a magazine. Think further and it gets more interesting. Suggests Salvator: imagine a window shade computer screen to be read while doing the dishes — activated by voice command or finger touch. Or a pen that expands into a small screen. Science fiction? Salvator suggests not. At the least, it's fun to think about the implications.
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Posted 4:40 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Journalism, In Print!
Steve Outing on academic books
University of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams has performed a useful service to the industry by cataloging and reviewing all of the textbooks published recently about online journalism. Her article was published at Online Journalism Review yesterday. She identified seven books specifically focused on online journalism, plus reviewed two general reporting books that contain chapters on writing for the Web.
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Posted 1:06 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Photos: Controversial Is OK
Steve Outing on new-media standards
Editor & Publisher is currently accepting entries for its Newspaper Photos of the Year competition. Entries can be images that were published in print editions or on newspaper websites. Because online photos are eligible, this contest could be interesting. It's not uncommon for photos that are too "controversial" to be published in print — the old "This is a family newspaper" argument — to find a home online. Think of some of the more gruesome (but nevertheless powerful) images that came out of 9/11 — like photos of bodies falling from the World Trade Center towers, or a picture of a severed hand at the WTC site, which typically were not published in print but did get posted at some news websites. Such online-published photos could make this contest a bit more intriguing than usual.
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Posted 10:10 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
E-mail Gets Professors' Attention
Steve Klein on online education
When I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin (too long ago), your professors' office hours were an important part of having an interactive course experience. There was no e-mail, no Google, no WebCT or Blackboard. Heck, there were no computers! Today, there is almost no excuse for students not to interact with their college instructors — and they do, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of 2,054 students on 27 U.S. campuses. About one in five students (19%) say e-mail is their primary out-of-class communication with professors, but nearly half (46%) say "e-mail allows them to express ideas to professors that they would not have expressed in class," reports Karen Thomas in a story in USA Today. The survey also revealed that most students use e-mail to report absences (65%), clarify assignments (75%), and discuss grades (58%)."Students don't feel closer to professors, but they feel better served by them," Steve Jones, the report author and a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, told Thomas. From my experience at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, I'd certainly agree that students use e-mail to clarify assignments. I require students to report absences (most don't unless you make it part of the syllabus), but grade discussions are almost entirely in person. At a school like GMU, where only a few thousand of the more than 24,000 students live on campus, e-mail becomes particularly important because students attend classes or participate in activities on an almost "per-service" basis. Therefore, it's surprising that there are still faculty members at many schools whose minimal computer literacy denies students this important and growing means of access and communication.
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Posted 3:54 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Call It 'Deep Querying'
Rich Gordon on the Ellis Island linking controversy
While the legal status of "deep linking" has not yet been definitively resolved by the courts, I would argue that the best legal case to refer to in discussing Stephen Morse's Web tool (original story; see Steve Outing's Tidbits comment two items below this one) is not the Tickets.com case, but rather a lawsuit filed by eBay against now-defunct Bidder's Edge. In that case, a federal judge granted eBay an injunction to bar Bidder's Edge from aggregating eBay auction listings on its site. The judge's ruling did not hinge on the "deep links" or on Bidder's Edge's republication of eBay content (descriptions of items for sale). Instead, the ruling was based on the additional server load created by the Bidder's Edge "spider" that was trawling eBay's site to capture the listings information. A site that "hits" your site's database with multiple queries raises more technical and legal issues than one that simply links to an item posted to the site. From the published report, it does seem to me that the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation was heavy-handed in its dealings with Morse, and in the end, the foundation ought to be interested in working out a deal to use his (apparently superior) search tools.
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Posted 1:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Dinosaurs Among Us
Steve Outing on old vs. new media
One of University of Alabama journalism professor Jim Stovall's students recently returned from the Society of Professional Journalists convention in Houston with a controversial souvenir — this t-shirt from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
Stovall notes the obvious irony of the message: "Just below the words Star-Telegram in the nameplate is the newspaper's Web address. It's clearly visible." (In case you're viewing a text-only version of this item, the t-shirt reads: "When's the last time your family sat down on a Sunday morning and read the Internet together? You can't replace the paper.")"My students were highly offended," he says. "They work for our College's news website, and several of them are committed to a future of Web journalism. They felt like they had been slapped in the face with the neanderthal newspaper attitude that seems to be more interested in killing trees than in delivering news and information to an interested audience. I told them to revel in the irony. Still, I can see their point. I just wonder what news websites would be like today if several years ago newspapers had embraced them rather than trying to kill them off with silly bromides."
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Posted 12:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Thinking About Deep Linking
Steve Outing on new round in continuing controversy
In my mind, at least, the controversy of "deep linking" is fairly black and white. (My position: if a publisher doesn't want others to link to its "inside" content, it should use technical — not legal — means to prevent it. Web publishers ideally should figure out how to take advantage of others linking to their content.) But in some instances, the issue starts to look gray. Mike Wendland, writing yesterday for the Detroit Free Press, reports on an interesting case involving a database created by the non-profit Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. It seems that computer wizard Stephen Morse created a Web tool that allowed amateur genealogists to search the Foundation database for their ancestors much more quickly and accurately than they could with the search tools provided by the foundation. The foundation forced Morse to take the tool off the Web, accusing him of stealing data.Now, you could say that Morse should have been allowed to keep the Web tool online, for it would seem to fit within the legal bounds set by the Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com decision — in which an attempt by Ticketmaster to get an injunction blocking deep linking to its content by Tickets.com was denied, thus upholding the right to deep link. But the issue is far from settled. Again in the Foundation dispute, a simple technical solution could have resolved the issue. Better yet, the Foundation and Morse should work together to bring the best solution (Morse's tool) to genealogists.
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Posted 11:57 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Employment Ad Trends, Online and Off
Martha Stone on online classifieds
As shown in a report released today by The Media Audit, newspaper employment ads got more than 12 million "regular" readers, while regular users of Web employment ads totaled 4.53 million in 85 major markets surveyed. Occasional readers of print employment ads totaled 32 million, while occasional users of online employment ads totaled 20 million. The print-Web crossover numbers are interesting: 40% of those who regularly read print employment ads also regularly read Web classified job sites. However, 14.9% of those who regularly visit Web job sites also regularly read print job ads.
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Posted 11:49 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No Fun in the Sandbox These Days
Steve Klein on online sports
About seven years ago, Larry Cotter and Bill Carey founded Wall Street Sports in Fairfax, Virginia, giving them a head start in the online fantasy sports wars. Eventually, they merged with Sandbox.com and for a time held their own against the later-coming big hitters from ESPN.com, TSN.com, SportsLine.com, and others. They've outlasted a lot of other pure plays, so it was sad to see the Washington Post report in a small item that the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 6.If you check out the Sandbox.com site, you'll see that the company says it has more than 7.3 million members. And over the years, the company raised more than $50 million in venture capital. Last fall, it looked like Sandbox.com was going to be bought by SportsLine.com for $2.5 million, but the deal fell through. Now, the fantasy sports portal lists its assets at less than $50,000. What is amazing, given the competition, is that the company stuck it out for so long. But with no brick-and-mortar base, the long-term odds were not good. Maybe it was just all a fantasy.
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Posted 11:43 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
CNN Leader: Versatile Reporters Essential
Laura Ruel on the mainstream multimedia journalist
The reporter/technician and the videophone are what CNN International president Chris Cramer says are essential to delivering news with depth and detail. According to a BBC report, Cramer told attendees of the International Broadcast Convention in Amsterdam on Monday that journalism organizations increasingly are relying on a "multi-skilled staff who can deliver stories, pictures, and technical know-how.""We will be constrained only by access and physics in terms of what we can get down a videophone," Cramer said. His speech also addressed the downside of immediate communications technology, but he did note that one of the greatest benefits of multimedia journalism is the ability to "push and pull news from the street, at a grassroots level."
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Posted 6:32 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Should Journalists be Webloggers?
Paul Grabowicz on online media
For E-Media Tidbits readers in the San Francisco Bay Area, my school is hosting a panel discussion on Tuesday (September 17) on whether journalists should be doing weblogs and whether weblogs are journalism — a topic that fellow Tidbits contributor Rich Gordon tackled last week (and which generated a lively debate). Panelists are Rebecca Blood and Meg Hourihan, long-time bloggers each of whom has recently written a book on weblogs, and three journalism bloggers: Dan Gillmor, J.D. Lasica, and Scott Rosenberg. The event is free and open to the public. We're also videotaping it and will put up an archived webcast. I'll post another note when that's available.
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Posted 6:20 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
OJA Finalists Announced
Steve Outing on online news competition
"Finalists" in the Online Journalism Awards were announced today. Judges (including me) met at Columbia University last Thursday and Friday to narrow down the entries in 17 categories. (We worked from lists of entries screened and pared down by a first-round set of judges.) Winners won't be announced until October 18 at the Online News Association's annual conference in New York City. Sorry to keep you in suspense. But it's always worthwhile to look over this list as it comes out each year. There's much to be learned from the finalists, who are all doing outstanding online journalism.
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Posted 6:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Another Free Newspaper Site Bites the Dust
Steve Outing on paid content
File this under "Paid-content trend continues." The website of the Columbus Dispatch has announced that it will be free only to print subscribers as of October 1. All others will have to pay $4.95 per month. Here's the explanation. And here's a letter from the paper's editor rationalizing the decision.I've said this many times before: I think such a strategy spells mediocrity for a news website, unless the intended strategy is that the site becomes nothing more than a supplement to the print edition, operating with a minimal staff and having scant opportunity to evolve into anything more. The smarter strategy is to keep substantial content free and charge for the "best" stuff. ("Best" might still be a majority of a site's content — but there's still a sizable amount of online material available free.) Also wise is to keep inbound links to your content working, so that online users can still find your content but will be faced with a payment screen (offering subscriptions, but also a small per-item fee to serve those who simply want to see one of your articles without establishing a long-term relationship).
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Posted 1:38 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Credibility Watchdog for Online Content
Steve Outing on Angela Gunn's new column
This sounds interesting. A press release hit my in-box this morning announcing that Angela Gunn has begun writing a twice-monthly column about credibility of online content, which will run on Consumer WebWatch. The first column is set to debut tomorrow (September 17). Gunn is co-founder and former ethics editor of Yahoo! Internet Life and currently technology editor for Time Out New York. Consumer WebWatch is a non-profit research project with a mission to improve the credibility of online content. It is part of Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and ConsumerReports.org.
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Posted 11:41 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Making of a Documentary – on the Web
Paul Grabowicz on digital storytelling
Two Frontline producers working on a documentary about what has become of the Al Qaeda terrorist network are using the Web to publish e-mail "dispatches" about their reporting while they're doing it. The dispatches are filed on an almost daily basis by the producers as they make their way through countries in the Middle East — giving viewers a unique insight into how a documentary is made and how journalists go about their jobs.
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Posted 11:32 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A New Home for Digital Storytelling
Steve Outing on online content
Nora Paul, who periodically writes for this weblog, reports that a new website focusing on digital storytelling is coming in mid-October from the Institute for New Media Studies, which she directs, and New Directions for News. The site will provide a place for people to share outstanding examples of digital storytelling, as well as a taxonomy of digital storymaking (which already exists in early form).
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Posted 11:10 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Copyright Bills Shaped by Hollywood/High-Tech Battle
Paul Grabowicz on digital copyright
The National Journal has an in-depth piece on the often behind-the-scenes tussle between the entertainment and technology industries over digital copyright issues — a dispute that produced many of the major copyright bills now pending in Congress.
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