web - Cynthia McCune on Diigo

21 Apr 09

Why journalists should learn to code (and why some shouldn't bother) :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews

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journalists web technology skills

Because many coders and developers aren't exactly rushing out to learn about inverted pyramids and cutlines, this gives the coding journalist an advantage.
Being both a journalist and a programmer/coder requires use of both sides of the brain. The left brain, which relies on logic and analysis, is more apt for synthesizing computer processes; the right brain relies more on intuition and creative thought, essential skills for a successful journalist. Because journalists are more likely to be right-brain thinkers, asking a writer to code is basically asking someone to rethink the way they think

14 Apr 09

‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers - NYTimes.com

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future of news hyperlocal web newspapers

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.
- As the saying goes, "Lead, follow or get out of the way."
  If news organizations don't lead on the web, others will...and they'll bypass newspapers. - on 2009-04-14
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The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources.
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- The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments.
- One problem is that the number of readers for each neighborhood-focused news page is inherently small.
- One of the most ambitious hyperlocal sites is EveryBlock, a six-person start-up
- Backed by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, it has created sites for 11 American cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.
- In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups.
- Unlike most hyperlocal start-ups, Patch, based in New York, hires reporters. It was conceived of and bankrolled by Tim Armstrong, the new chief of AOL, after he found a dearth of information online about Riverside, Conn., where he lives. Patch has created sites for three towns in New Jersey and plans to be in dozens by the end of the year.
  One journalist in each town travels to school board meetings and coffee shops with a laptop and camera. Patch also solicits content from readers, pulls in articles from other sites and augments it all with event listings, volunteer opportunities, business directories and lists of local information like recycling laws.
- One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content.
- many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.
- “In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

09 Apr 09

8 Indispensable Web Services the Modern Reporter Can’t Afford to Skip | New Media Bytes | Online journalism, web production and promotion

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tools journalism web

If you’re new to RSS, here’s an explainer on how to use RSS.
The best tools integrating RSS into your workflow include Google Reader and Google Homepage.
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- Instead of performing a search or visiting a number of web sites each day to find new information on a topic you’re researching, why not have Google, Yahoo! or Twitter tell you when there’s something new you should know about?
- Here’s the Alerts services you should try out:
  
  Google Alerts
  Yahoo! Alerts
  TweetScan Alerts - Get alerted when your keywords are tweeted
- Google Trends - Google Trends’ Hot 100 show the top search terms on their network for the past few hours.
- Twitturly - Check out the most shared/talked about links on the Twitter network.
- I think the trend monitoring sites are very under-rated when it comes to journalism. They are fantastic, especially for those quirky or lighter stories that brighten the news agenda.

01 Apr 09

The Music Industry, Adapting to a Digital Future : NPR Music

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music web digital future

Writer Eliot Van Buskirk joins Fresh Air to discuss the new, digital landscape of music, and the resulting changes in the music industry.

31 Mar 09

How my publisher father predicted electronic news | Newsweek My Turn | Newsweek.com

www.newsweek.com/191406 - Preview

future of news newspapers web

He believed newspapers could save themselves from extinction—but only if they adapted early and intelligently to new technology.
One former publisher told me recently that Barry Bingham Jr. "was the visionary among us. He said what we didn't want to hear and we ran from it."
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- He believed that the future of news lay in allowing readers to decide what was most important to them, as with today's customizable home pages. To most editors, this was heresy. This frustrated him and he made little effort to hide it. "This business," he snapped to a reporter in 1983, "is like the last dinosaur in the swamp."

The Shift

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future of news newspapers web photography multimedia storytelling

Learning multimedia is a lot like learning music. You have to get your "chops" on one instrument.
Photojournalists begin learning multimedia with their core competency in decisive moment-based still photography, and then apply their stills "chops" and original point of view to video, which is hungry for the "decisive sequence."
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- There remains the problem of how to decide which tool to use when gathering multimedia and print assets. This is the professional leap of faith that is required to feel comfortable in the "shift."
  
  In the movie, MediaStorm Founder and CEO Brian Storm http://www.mediastorm.org talks about the concept of trust. "Editors don't have a problem trusting photographers in the field when it comes to choosing between a wide angle or a telephoto (lens)," Storm said in Portland on June 2. "Now they'll have to get comfortable letting photographers decide whether it's video or audio, or audio and stills."
- Since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1992, newspapers have tried just about everything to "look interactive". The truth of the matter is that a newspaper can't be interactive.
- it makes sense that there's a "shift" under way. This shift is as important to today's journalists as the invention of hot type and the halftone process were to the journalists at the turn of the previous century.
- Negroponte's theory about the ongoing shift from wired to wireless was part of his greater assertion that we are rapidly moving from "atoms to bits."
- Slide shows are a good entry point for timeline-based newspaper Web site storytelling. However, in all but a few beautiful cases, slide shows are not optimal web storytelling.
- the newspaper will need to establish a print and Web infrastructure flexible enough for stories to be told in the medium (or mix of media) for which they are best suited.
- As we consider newspapering's shift from dots on paper to pixels on plasma, it's helpful to consider radio. National Public Radio represents the thoughtful, compelling "think piece" style of journalism we associate with the Sunday paper (Weekend Edition Sunday even has the Sunday Puzzle). AM radio news, on the other hand, deals with news by the hour (or by the minute, as need be) to get breaking information to listeners.
- In the near future, I think, the printed page will become more valuable to readers in the FM sense -- it will be reserved for the news that needs to be embraced and kept at hand. Newspaper Web sites are already taking on the AM radio role of delivering breaking information to readers as stories develop.

13 Mar 09

Daniel Sinker: Where is Our Orchestra? What Journalism Can Learn From the Mind-Blowing Remixes of Kutiman

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music web youtube mashup journalism

Kutiman, an Israeli musician, cuts his songs together using snippets of performances on hundreds of YouTube videos.
Kutiman, an Israeli musician, cuts his songs together using snippets of performances on hundreds of YouTube videos.
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- Kutiman, an Israeli musician, cuts his songs together using snippets of performances on hundreds of YouTube videos.
- "If your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we'd go about suing someone who 'did this' with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page."
- a win for anyone who's thought about just what it is we can do exactly with this explosion of self-expression the internet has engendered
- What can we do with it? Kutiman gives a simple, elegant answer: anything. It's a river, just reach in.
- Right now, some journalists look at the wealth of material on the web as a threat -- they see all these amateur voices and worry that they will overpower their own (hence the many, many, many stories about how "bloggers can't replace reporters"). Others look at it and see what journalists always see: story ideas. Hence all the stories you've had to slog through about Twitter this last month. Both are wrong.
- need to look at this stuff not as competition or story fodder, but instead see it through the eyes of Kutiman: it is an endless supply of raw goods, ready to be remixed, rebuilt, and recreated in ways that are wholly new and wholly unexpected. At the end of the day, that's what journalism has always been best at: taking the world around us and giving it back to us in new ways. Well, that world has suddenly become much easier to access -- it's telling us about itself all the time. But that doesn't mean that the stories it tells are enough
- Journalists need to not simply reach in, but dive in headfirst. We need to build our own orchestras out of the information being created all around us. Be like Kutiman: use the millions of blog entries, photos, tweets, and videos that find themselves on the web every day to build something new.

12 Feb 09

2008 Top Ten Best Newspaper Websites

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newspapers web top10

14 Dec 08

Web 2.0? Or Is It More Like Web 16.0? - Alan C. Baird - Open Salon

A short history of web development.

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web2.0 web

here's a history of the most significant events on the www
WEB 1.1 -- 1967 - Markup language is created < / end >
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- WEB 2.0 - WYSIWYG - "What You See Is What You Get (sometimes)"
- WEB 2.3 -- 1971 - @ is created to separate hosts and users
- WEB 2.6 -- 1974 - The term "Internet" is adopted
- WEB 3.1 -- 1979 - Email is made available to personal computer users
- WEB 4.1 -- 1980 - First ISPs created providing dialup internet
- WEB 4.6 -- 1985 - FTP - The File Transfer Protocol is created
- Physicist Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues needed a simple system for creating/displaying documents
- they created their own relatively simple system, consisting of browsing software called "WorldWideWeb," a protocol for transmitting the information (HTTP) and a document annotation convention called "Hyper Text Markup Language" (HTML). This meant anyone could now create web pages using their simple language.
- WEB 6.0 - Search - "Did You Mean: Google?"
  
  Before 1990, there was no way to find a page
- WEB 7.2 -- 1993 - Screen casts are first created
  WEB 7.3 -- 1994 - Wikis are created; Britannica begins holding its breath
- Online diaries were first created in 1994
- WEB 8.1 -- 1996 - The first social bookmarking site created
- WEB 9.2 -- 1997 - The term "Blog" is adopted
- WEB 11.0 - RSS - "Newspapers Deemed Obsolete"
- Users no longer had to trawl the web for new information, they could "subscribe" to a feed and have it sent to them directly.
- WEB 12.1 -- 2001 - Blogs evolve from online diaries
  
  WEB 13.0 - PODCASTING
- portable on demand broadcasting
- Podcasting opens up distribution of audio content to anyone with a server, with users "subscribing" to the RSS feeds that appeal to them.
- WEB 13.1 -- 2002 - Folksonomy is created, giving rise to "tags"
  
  WEB 14.0 - VIDEO PODCASTING - "Web-Based One-Sided Conversations"

30 Oct 08

What’s the Difference Between a Blog and a Web Site? — contentious.com

What's the difference between a blog and a web site? Not much, in a growing number of cases. Except, of course, blogs are easier.

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blog web

My take on this is that the difference between blogs and web sites is steadily vanishing. These channels are definitely converging.
After all, a blog is nothing more than a kind of web site supported by a content management system that provides a useful collection of features
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- blogging is far more versatile than it used to be
- For instance, Wordpress, which started out as an open-source blogging platform, has grown to become a full-fledged content management system. Blogging is just one part of what you can do with Wordpress. You also can integrate static pages, forums tools, media libraries, and virtually anything else you’d want to have on a “web site.”

10 Oct 08

Xark!: 10 reasons why newspapers won't reinvent news

I no longer believe that (non-national) metro newspapers will play a significant role in the reinvention of the press in its 21st century configuration.

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future of newspapers future of news innovators web online

I no longer believe that (non-national) metro newspapers will play a significant role in the reinvention of the press in its 21st century configuration.
I no longer believe that (non-national) metro newspapers will play a significant role in the reinvention of the press in its 21st century configuration.
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- The chance to act with foresight in advance of the coming wave came and went, and now these once-proud press flagships are swamped, broken and sinking.
- The newspaper dilemma: Change the product in hopes of attracting new readers and you piss off your loyal core. Do nothing and you'll watch your circulation drop every day on the obituary page.
- No budget for research, development or training means most newspapers can't see what's coming, don't have the necessary tools for survival and couldn't use those new tools effectively anyway
- most newspaper payrolls are bloated with pluralities of resentful Luddites who struggle with the complexities of e-mail
- Until Web becomes the primary profit-center within newspaper companies, all the incentives within their business operations will point toward the status quo.
- In 2008, all meaningful political discourse -- the essential element of social currency -- takes place on the Web. Print (and televised) political coverage is now but a pale shadow of the real action online.
- Boosting short-term profits by cutting quality is obviously a losing strategy, and the recent wave of newspaper layoffs and buyouts only exacerbated the trend.
- You'll never successfully reinvent your company if you're punishing the innovators, killing the messengers, rewarding the political infighters and sneering down your noses at the "pajamas-clad rabble" you blame for your troubles.

Mahalo.com: Human-powered Search

Rec by Sholin, who notes it's "turning into a really interesting news/information mix. The short version...Mahalo = Wikipedia with a small group of paid editors, run by the guy who built Weblogs, Inc. (@JasonCalacanis)

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web2.0 social mahalo web search news future of news new media news media

Cynthia McCune's Library tagged web → View Popular

Why journalists should learn to code (and why some shouldn't bother) :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews

‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers - NYTimes.com

8 Indispensable Web Services the Modern Reporter Can’t Afford to Skip | New Media Bytes | Online journalism, web production and promotion

The Music Industry, Adapting to a Digital Future : NPR Music

How my publisher father predicted electronic news | Newsweek My Turn | Newsweek.com

The Shift

Daniel Sinker: Where is Our Orchestra? What Journalism Can Learn From the Mind-Blowing Remixes of Kutiman

2008 Top Ten Best Newspaper Websites

Web 2.0? Or Is It More Like Web 16.0? - Alan C. Baird - Open Salon

What’s the Difference Between a Blog and a Web Site? — contentious.com

Xark!: 10 reasons why newspapers won't reinvent news

Mahalo.com: Human-powered Search

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