Posts tagged Nieman Lab
Nieman Lab’s New E-book
The best of their June articles, and it’s free! Available on iPad/iPhone, Nook, Sony Reader, and Kindle. They’d like feedback so download here and respond if you so wish.
News consumption is growing more mobile, but with the number of smartphone and tablet users on the rise, it might make sense for newsrooms to abandon text alerts — which can cost money for both sender and receiver — and shift to push notifications and that old standby, email.
News Mob: OC Register Assigns 70 Reporters to Cover 1 Baseball Game
via Nieman Lab:
Ever since the Angels signed star first baseman Albert Pujols and pitcher C.J. Wilson, fans had been going nuts with anticipation for the 2012 season. The growing excitement gave the paper’s Angels editor, Keith Sharon, what he called a “crazy idea.”
“They’ve never been so excited,” Sharon told me. “Given that atmosphere, I wanted to match the intensity and the enthusiasm of the fans somehow. I like flash mobs, I like cash mobs, and what I’ve been telling people is this is an overwhelming choreographed allocation of news resources. I want everybody who sees our website, our print product, our iPad product, our mobile device product to think: ‘They thought of everything. I mean everything.’”
So what exactly does an Angels news mob cover?
A real estate reporter is doing a story about how property values around Angel Stadium have gone up. A business reporter talked to the manufacturer of Angels bobbleheads. A technology reporter interviewed the person who picks the songs and video clips that run during the game. The person who usually covers celebrity gossip filed a story about the 1870s-era baseball cards that are in a Library of Congress collection. One reporter is writing a story about an Angels fan who plans to propose to his girlfriend at the opening-night game.
FJP: Great idea? Overkill? Not quite sure yet.
Illustrating that point: Last year, five technology giants — not including Apple and Amazon — generated 68 percent of all digital ad revenue. By 2015, Facebook is expected to account for one of every five digital display ads sold. In contrast, print ad revenues were down $2.1 billion, or 9.2 percent, last year. Losses in print outweighed $207 million in online advertising gains by a ratio of 10 to 1.
This dynamic gave Pew researchers an idea that has been floated before: Could a tech giant like Google or Facebook swoop in and “save” a household-name newspaper by buying it? Mitchell says there are signs that “speak to the possibility of that happening,” namely the idea that technology leaders might identify news production as a path to omnipresence in consumers’ lives. But why would a profitable company want to acquire an operation — even one with a legacy brand — that’s in the red?
How to Avoid Obesity
Information obesity, that is. Clay Johnson sums it up quite well in this LA Times piece.
The problem is that these days you can feast on information as never before, and you can do it without leaving the living room couch. But consuming too much of the wrong kind of information can lead to a kind of information obesity as dangerous as that caused by too much of the wrong kinds of food.
Just as we know we should curb the cookies and high fructose corn syrup, Johnson suggests we construct healthy info diets for ourselves.
We eat a lot of junk food because it is cheap and tastes good and we haven’t trained our taste buds differently. Well, your information diet is as important to your general well-being as your food diet. Building a healthy information diet can give you more time, strengthen your social relationships and reduce your stress levels.
This would be a good time to check out what the experts do, like in The Atlantic Wire Media Diet series, or revisit Chao’s video piece on Jay Rosen’s news diet.
For those who don’t trust social news aggregators, while building your diet and picking tools, check out topheadlin.es, a new app-in-progress from the Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Singer-Vine. (Via Nieman)
In the same way that services like News.me, Zite, or our own Fuego aggregate social news judgments (like Twitter patterns) or personal news judgments (like user behavior), topheadlin.es aggregates editorial news judgments.
Happy dieting (& feel free to let us know how it goes)!
Meet Deep Dive, the New York Times’ experimental context engine and story explorer
Using an article as a jumping-off point, Deep Dive can create a custom, contextual feed that will allow readers to follow topics in the news.
Deep Dive uses the Times’ massive cache of metadata from stories to go, as the name suggests, deeper into a news event by pulling together related articles. So instead of performing a search yourself within the Times and weeding out off-topic results, Deep Dive would provides readers a collection of stories relating to a topic, based on whatever person, place, event or topic of their choosing. So let’s say you’re interested in protests in Yemen, with Deep Dive you could use an article from nytimes.com as a seed and let the system collect a history of previous items relating to news from the region.
Really interesting tool. When I was in Studio 20, we examined “explainer journalism” in detail. A huge part of an explainer is being able to find the history of the story easily so that you can bring yourself up to date on the issue in the new article.
continue reading at Nieman Journalism Lab
The Newsonomics of Gamification —and Civilization
Game dynamics isn’t about time-wasting. Au contraire: it’s about a seductive, powerful drawing-in of human habit. It’s about changing those habits, leading us to do new things (over and over again). This being America, those habits increasingly have a lot to do with selling stuff, with commerce. On the Internet, they increasingly help companies chase greater engagement with customers, be they buyers, readers, or both.
- Ken Doctor on combining journalism and game dynamics via Nieman Lab
The Pilates approach: How CNN is trouncing its competitors on the web
Using numbers from multiple analytics firms, it has long been apparent that CNN beats not only its cable news competitors on the web, but nearly every other major news source, as well. According to comScore, CNN received an average of 8.5 million unique U.S. visitors a day for the first three months of this year, figures that dwarf MSNBC’s 7.4 million daily visitors and Fox’s 2.3 million. A comScore spokesman provided me with charts showing that CNN, with 75.9 million US visitors, is beaten only by Yahoo! News Network’s 88 million. In U.S. monthly uniques, CNN outperforms MSNBC.com (51 million), AOL News (40 million), Fox News (20 million), CBS News (16.4 million), and The New York Times (32.9 million).
Apple makes its subscription rules more friendly to news organizations; but were they really the target?
Interesting news on the Apple/news-biz front: Apple appears to have backed away from its requirement that subscriptions to content (such as a newspaper or magazine) be offered at the same price as in-app purchases as when they’re offered externally. In fact, Apple seems to have ended the requirement that such subscriptions be offered as in-app purchases at all. Kudos to MacRumors for spotting the change.
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Vadim Lavrusik: How journalists can make use of Facebook Pages
Editor’s Note: Late last month, Vadim Lavrusik moved from his role as the community manager and social strategist at Mashable to become Facebook’s firstJournalist Program Manager. In his new position, Vadim is now responsible for building and managing programs that help journalists, in various ways, make use of Facebook in their work. Below, he shares some ways that journalists have been taking advantage of one of the site’s features: Facebook Pages.
This is such a great overview of the ways journalists have used Facebook. ~Chao Li
Come have a drink with Nieman Lab!
Nothing formal — just a chance for people interested in the future of news to get together. We’ll get there around 6 p.m. and stick around until at least 8, maybe later. The first 10 people to come say hi to me get a free beer. The next 10 get a talking-to about the importance of punctuality. The next 10 get a handshake. Anyone after that: a knowing nod.
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Local Paper Rockville Central Moves to Facebook-Only Publishing
With competition from Aol’s hyperlocal news site Patch, community news site Rockville Central has decided to publish through Facebook only. Via Nieman Lab:
Starting March 1, Rockville Central, a community news outlet for the DC-area city of Rockville, Maryland, will move its operation to…its Facebook page. Entirely to its Facebook page.
“There are always two different conversations going on,” Cindy Cotte Griffiths, the site’s editor, told me — one on RockvilleCentral.com, and the other on the site’s Facebook page. Why force the two to compete with each other, when they’re actually manifestations of the same community? Facebook is, Cotte Griffiths notes, “where the people are.” (Rockville Central currently gets about 2,000 of its average 20,000 monthly hits from Facebook, she told me.) “Everyone’s always trying to get people out of Facebook,” she says. “And we’re like, ‘Well, we’re already here.’”
Already Facebook has become one of the most prolific drivers of traffic to sites, and the numbers are truly staggering. Facebook’s Justin Osofsky said that traffic to the Washington Post’s website increased 280 percent year-over-year because of social media referrals, according to a blog post written Dec. 28, 2010.
Expect this growth to continue on its rampaging course for the foreseeable future.
Facebook this week posted a job opening for a “journalist program manager,” based out of their New York City office, whose job would, among other things, to be to preach the gospel of the social network as a sourcing and content distribution platform for journalist and publications. Responsibilities will include
Lead development of strategic programs and projects which help journalists use Facebook progressively as a reporting and distribution tool
Identify and document best practices for journalists, including creating content and case studiesSpeak at industry conferences and partner events related to journalism and social media
Counsel individual journalists on how to use Facebook
Provide hands on leadership of cross-functional projects to engage journalists in conjunction with the partnership and marketing teams
Serve as an advocate for journalists within Facebook, and identify new product and partnership opportunities
Develop relationships with key industry and academic institutions with journalism programs
If the move to Facebook-only publishing is followed by other organizations, the question will be, what sort of brand dilution occurs when you no longer control your distribution medium? Already Facebook is playing an outsize roll in the media, but what sacrifices will be borne by content creators in exchange for Facebook picking up the tab for publishing and distribution?
The Role of Secrecy in Journalism
Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, speaks at a Nieman Lab event about the organization’s relationship to state secrets in light of WikiLeaks.
Important is his discussion of what — and what not — the Times decides to publish, its relationship with the government, and the role of whistle blowing in a democratic society.
Click to listen, right click to download.
For instant response to the talk, follow #Niemanleaks. Nieman Lab can be followed on Twitter and, of course, their Web site.
