web - Michael Becker on Diigo

15 Oct 09

Guardian to become 24/7 Web-first newspaper

The Guardian's guidelines for being a Web-first newspaper. These are from 2007.

www.cyberjournalist.net/...004104.php - Preview

guideline Jeff Jarvis Guardian web online-first newsroom Alan Rusbridger

If we don’t update our site continuously readers will go elsewhere.
It means publishing more of our news according to the demands of the web rather than the rhythms and expectations of a newspaper
1 more annotations...
- Our production processes must reflect the needs of the web (e.g. the use of web-friendly headlines as well as newspaper headlines, links, tagging, key wording and so on.)

05 Oct 09

Five phrases to outlaw in newsrooms

Journalist and Web 2.0 enthusiast Alison Gow lists a few of the things she never wants to hear in a newsroom again.

headlinesanddedlines.blogspot.com/...es-to-outlaw-in-newsrooms.html - Preview

online-first newsroom web journalism Alison Gow

Whether the issue is reporters speaking up, or news editors listening to them, or editors being clear on what the agenda is, it's not an insurmountable problem.
Blogging isn't a mystery, but why some people in a newsroom view it as a chore to be avoided it at every opportunity is. The internet isn't going away and advertisers are not going to start hurling money at newspapers like they used to; this means that anyone planning on staying in journalism should want to be learning new skills - not only do these open up whole new ways of story-telling, but they make sense from a point of self-interest.
3 more annotations...
- Don't wait to be asked - think! Plan ahead in the same way you marshal your questions in advance for a planned interview, and if it's a breaking news story then the scope for instant digital journalism is even greater - tweet, post photos of what's happening to your own or your newspaper's Twitter stream, livestream action using Qik or Bambuser, and be proactive. Text is the least creative part of any news story; ultimately, no matter how well-written your colleagues tell you it is, it's simply 350-plus words to fill a space in a news page. If you supplement your text with still and moving images, a podcast, an interactive Q&A, or a liveblog, how much more dynamic and memorable will your complete package be? How much more valuable will it be to the audience? The answer is simple: A lot.
- The Don'ts and the Won'ts usually revert to Stress, Morose or Baffled mode when asked to do something vaguely digital, and then don't do it, citing various problems, from technical to time. The main problem, of course, is that their chosen industry has evolved, and they haven't, yet.
- Any journalists who use the phrase "Digital doesn't make money", or its evil twin "Print is where the money is" when questioning (aloud or as part of an inner debate) the value of a newspaper's website need to stop and consider this question: Why does suddenly this matter to you?
  
  Someone raised an interesting point with me recently by asking why newspaper journalists - who have always viewed themselves as above the sordid business of making money - have suddenly started wielding digital income statistics like a shield.

26 Sep 09

Murdoch says won't make all of online WSJ free

By Ben Hirschler DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said on Thursday he would not make all online Wall Street Journal content free. Dow Jones & Co has begun opening access to some previously paid-for items...

www.reuters.com/...idUSL2473813520080125 - Preview

paywalls web internet accessibility news publishing Rupert Murdoch

16 Sep 09

Statistical evidence: many newspaper execs not seeing reality

Steve Outing presents us with graphical evidence that newspaper execs and readers aren't on the same page when it comes to newspapers' free Web sites.

steveouting.com/...paper-execs-not-seeing-reality - Preview

web newspapers journalism newspaper business models business

09 Apr 09

AP is fighting last century's battle

Dave Winer lists some of the reasons he see's behind the AP's new approach to online news.

www.scripting.com/...pIsFightingLastCenturysBa.html - Preview

Associated Press Dave Winer Google online Twitter real-time Web

That, my dear friends at AP (no sarcasm) is where you should be pouring your energy, not trying to take back what you think Google took from you. That happened a long time ago, and the toothpaste ain't going back in the tube.
- Winer says the AP is in the perfect position to create a real-time news Web site, the kind of site that could tell people "what's news NOW," which is what Winer sees as the most popular purpose of the Web -- finding out what's going on now. - on 2009-04-09
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25 Mar 09

Display advertising solutions

RevenueTwoPointZero describes some of the new thinking going into display advertising on news sites and ways to drive readers to deeper pages on the site, which are better advertising locations.

revenuetwopointzero.com/...hompage-solutions - Preview

advertising newspapers business web web2.0 design

20 Mar 09

More present than the present

Nicholas Carr shuns McLuhan and embraces Baudrillard as a prophet of the modern 'Net age.

www.roughtype.com/...more_present_th.php - Preview

Nicholas Carr Jean Baudrillard philosophy Web Twitter social_networking community

14 Mar 09

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

An excellent essay by Clay Shirky describing the revolutionary times we live in and offering some blunt yet necessary words to those who think newspapers are salvageable.

www.shirky.com/...s-and-thinking-the-unthinkable - Preview

Clay Shirky newspapers revolution publishing printing Internet Web Gutenberg singularity business advertising Craigslist experiments

“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
8 more annotations...
- This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
- “The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
- “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
- The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
  - An excellent question. Those transitional, border, liminal areas of geography and history are always the most fruitful and interesting places to examine. - on 2009-03-14
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- And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
- The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
- Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
- For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers.

24 Feb 09

Defined: Newspaper Platform

Using newspapers effectively online means rethinking all the old definitions and getting away from the print mentality, says CoPress's Joey Baker.

www.copress.org/...defined-newspaper-platform - Preview

journalism CoPress Joey Baker Web

Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a Web site, but they’re still using a print mentality to maintain it.
the Internet has changed the definition of a journalist
2 more annotations...
- journalists should be viewed as community leaders; people that know a lot about a topic and are therefore respected enough by the community to inform others. This makes them something of a mixture of a columnist (read: blogger), a reporter (read: blogger), and a content creator (read: photographer/videographer/designer/infographics-maker/databaseminer/developer).
- If there’s a story online that’s relevant to your community, link to it. Who cares if you wrote it or not? The idea is to be the source of news.

27 Jan 09

The three primary roles your local website should play

Steve Yelvington tells us that local newspaper sites should play the town crier, town square and town expert -- and he notes that these roles are "coequal."

www.yelvington.com/528 - Preview

local_news Steve Yelvington newspapers news journalism Web

News is not enough. Doing the same thing better and faster is not enough. It's time to look left and right at what's not being done.

25 Jan 09

Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing.

www.locusmag.com/...octorow-writing-in-age-of.html - Preview

Cory Doctorow Locus Online attention writing internet Web productivity

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing.
But the Internet has been very good to me. It's informed my creativity and aesthetics, it's benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I'd no sooner give it up than I'd give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.
5 more annotations...
- It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes.
- When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web.
- It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time.
- Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on.
- By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

26 Dec 08

One ISP says RIAA must pay for piracy protection

The RIAA plans to stop suing everyone and use the ISPs to enforce copyrights. Too bad they forgot to consult with the thousands of ISPs in the country before essentially demanding free work out of them.

news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10127841-93.html - Preview

RIAA copyright ISP Web law lawsuit CNET

20 Dec 08

The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers (2008 Edition)

Study by the Bivings Group on the features of America's online newspaper offerings

www.bivingsreport.com/...argest-newspapers-2008-edition - Preview

newspapers Web interactive group

Our research examined the websites of the top 100 newspapers in the United States, as determined by circulation
58 percent of newspapers offered some form of user generated content in 2008 compared to 24 percent in 2007
5 more annotations...
- Seventy five percent of newspapers now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33 percent in 2007
- Ninety-two percent of newspapers now include this option compared to only seven percent in 2006.
- Of the new features examined in this year’s study, we found that 57 percent of newspapers offer PDF editions, 20 percent offer chatting options, 96 percent provide local weather information, 40 percent utilize SMS alerts and 70 percent offer community event calendars.
- Now only 11 percent of websites require registration to view full articles, compared to 29 percent in 2007 and 23 in 2006.
- However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.

10 Dec 08

The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It

A digital copy of the book by Jonathan Zittrain put into the CommentPress engine.

yupnet.org/zittrain - Preview

Internet history web2.0 criticism academic books web

26 Nov 08

The Internet Squelches the Spoken Word

Scientists fear that text messaging and nonverbal communication online may be allowing young people's verbal communication skills to atrophy.

www.internetevolution.com/author.asp - Preview

Technology&Science communication Web texting orality literacy Internet social_networking

19 Nov 08

Twitter to journalists: Here’s how it’s done

A collection of tips from journalists about using Twitter and other social networking tools to further journalism, as collected by Monica Guzman at Eat, Sleep, Publish.

eatsleeppublish.com/journalists-heres-how-its-done - Preview

Twitter Web2.0 web tools journalism social_networking

15 Nov 08

The Cyberspace and Critical Theory Overview

This page looks to be an indext to various critical pages, all having to do with hypertext and cyberspace. I came across it while building an Evernote library for hypertext.

www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace - Preview

hypertext intertextuality critical_theory Web theory technology references

09 Nov 08

Blogging grows up

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death.

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

web2.0 blogging dissemination writing internet web technology culture business

03 Nov 08

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004

Wired warns us against starting a new blog in 2008 because the blogosphere just ain't what it used to be. Instant communication tools like Twitter and social networks like Facebook make blogs look like slow-moving relics from another tech age.

www.wired.com/...st_essay - Preview

blogging Wired web2.0 twitter publishing social_networking facebook Web writing communication

19 Sep 08

960 Grid System

960.gs - Preview

css design layout tools web

Michael Becker's Library tagged web → View Popular

Guardian to become 24/7 Web-first newspaper

Five phrases to outlaw in newsrooms

Murdoch says won't make all of online WSJ free

Statistical evidence: many newspaper execs not seeing reality

AP is fighting last century's battle

Display advertising solutions

More present than the present

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Defined: Newspaper Platform

The three primary roles your local website should play

Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

One ISP says RIAA must pay for piracy protection

The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers (2008 Edition)

The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It

The Internet Squelches the Spoken Word

Twitter to journalists: Here’s how it’s done

The Cyberspace and Critical Theory Overview

Blogging grows up

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004

960 Grid System

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