Online Journalism News - Editor's Pick
This is a round-up of the best news about online journalism from sources other than Journalism.co.uk, selected and edited by our news team.
The Washington-based Sunlight Foundation demonstrated a range of tools at last weeks NewsTools 2008 conference for covering the US election online.
The tools include: a widget that creates a pop-up link to a profile of a member of Congress when someone scrolls over their name on a webpage; and the 'under-development' Influence Explorer, which will offer 'one-click disclosure' of candidates' political and campaign expenditure.
The stressed state of the US economy is causing advertising budgets to shrink - causing News Corp to miss its ambitious online revenue target of one billion dollars by ten per cent, Rupert Murdoch said yesterday.
Reuters reported that the media tycoon claimed Fox Interactive Media - which runs the online part of his US empire, including MySpace - will however have "well over" $1 billion in revenue in the 2009 financial year.
Twitter will remove accounts of users who have violated its terms of service as throw a heap of spam through the system.
The previous policy was to freeze those accounts - now they will be removed - say developers on this thread from their Twitter Development Talk Google group.
Speaking on a panel at the Digital Hollywood conference, Jim Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post's online division, said he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards, and if need be, automatically kick them off for good.
He added that there was no guaranteed anonymity for those who post comments to Washingtonpost.com.
Social media firm Pluck will supply technology to Hearst Digital's uber-web portal Allaboutyou.com
It will provided blogs, discussion tools and media-sharing applications to the new community site for women, which combines content from six Natmag's UK tiles.
The move is part of an 'aggressive' push of the business, says the Guardian.
For Hearst, it's the second major partnership for its magazine websites after securing the services of Brightcove to supply its digital video hosting.
Publishing 2.0 takes the Yahoo/Microsoft story as a good example of where it is uneconomic to run news pieces that will just be swamped by leading and other news sources running the story.
Over 2000 news pieces on a Google News search about the latest developments about the deal - if your not it the top ten - is it really worth the bother?
"If each site were, as in print, an island unto itself, this would make sense - if the news outlet did not cover the story then its readers might not know about it," wrote Scott Karp.
"But seen as a whole on the web, which connects each and every one of these websites, and especially seen through the lens of an aggregator like Google News or Techmeme, this huge mass of content about the same story doesn’t make much economic sense."
BBC World has tied up a deal with six mobile service providers in India to provide video clips to phones.
BBC also plans to increase it news programming on its television channel BBC World News and generate content for video on demand and podcasts as well, reports Indiainfo.
Ien Cheng, the FT's most senior digital executive, will leave the newspaper in the next month to join Google.
In his new role Cheng, who has been at the FT for eight years, will become director of product management for advertising on Google's European leadership team.
Nielsen will start measuring traffic generated by mobile devices to internet sites.
A new tool, TotalWeb, will be used to produce unduplicated figures for access to sites via the internet and mobiles.
Yesterday the UK's Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE) announced plans to add mobile metrics to its audits.
The Pentagon is to launch a network of foreign language news sites, including an Arabic site for Iraqis.
The sites will be staffed by local journalists in the countries reporting on US interests and carrying an anti-insurgency message.
In an attempt to break down the divide between technology and editorial sections of the newsroom, the Telegraph as introduced a newsroom lab for all members of staff to develop new online products, and 'take some of the culture [of the lab] back out onto the floor'.
Historic publication Gramophone magazine is to publish all its content to the web, creating a searchable archive of issues right back to its first edition, published in 1923. A download and mail order service will follow, making the site a valuable online resource for fans of classical music.
The annual report from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has suggested that the number of complaints made to the body about online advertising is for the first time higher than those relating to TV or newspapers.
ASA received 2,980 complaints about the internet in 2007, though 72 per cent of these related to content and as such fell outside of the authority's jurisdiction.
"Interestingly, these complaints are almost entirely about truth, accuracy, misleadingness, and availability – the 'meat and drink' of the ASA’s daily work on print and broadcast ads," said Chris Smith, chairman of ASA.
"We hope for an early outcome to the detailed discussions under way within the industry, led by the Advertising Association, on the development of ways to ensure continued responsibility in advertising in new media settings.
Live blogging service CoverItLive is planning some handy updates including possible integration with fellow online tool Twitter.
Details are uncertain at the moment, but Keith McSpurren, president of CoverItLive, says an iPhone version is also in the pipeline.
YouTube and Google will hold a live streamed forum with the American presidential candidates in September.
According to the companies the site's will allow the users to engage in the debate in 'important ways'.
Dave Lee offers tips on how to make the most of simple Google apps - calendar, email and documents - to organize operations at a student newspaper.
Simple steps, which more importantly can be implemented for free.
Handy tips on how to use social bookmarking tool del.icio.us to discover why people are tagging your content and what keywords they are using.
The tool can also be used to assess the popularity - in terms of bookmarked content - of your competitors' sites.
Vinh answers readers questions on what it takes to work for the newsroom of NYTimes.com and the design details of the online edition.
In the feature, Vinh admits the paper looks to other news websites for inspiration and gives Guardian.co.uk in particular.
"We draw inspiration from what's happening in digital media at large, regardless of whether or not a news organization is explicitly involved," adds Vinh.
Online women's magazine skirt is holding a competition to decide on a new name for the site.
Users can vote on a selection of domain names including Fierst, Lemonade and 19rocks, and submit their own.
HFUK's acquisition of entertainment and media news site Digital Spy - for an undisclosed but significant sum - was the result of months of 'nagging' from staff at fellow title Inside Soap.
The publisher isn't looking to change the structure of the site, but will hope to capitalise on its huge fanbase and active forums, which count Alan Sugar as a member.
More presence for Femail content and a carousel of 'funny' news stories on the Daily Mail's beta website rate highly with Belam.
More importantly, he says, the fact that it is in beta is a big plus:
"Not many mainstream media organisations have been brave enough to engage with widespread testing of new designs on their audience in this way."
Strong news stories and improved online production operations were behind the traffic surge to Telegraph.co.uk last month.
The site recorded a 38.69 per cent month-on-month increase in unique users, according to the ABCE figures released last week.
In addition, the site may have been under reporting previous traffic figures, as the result of some pages not being tracked by the measurement tools.
iPM is working with the CASA (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) - developer of a website for sharing maps - to use the technology more closely for journalistic ends.
Aside from this (and in a totally non-scientific way, they say) iPM wants to create a mood map of the credit crunch, assessing how people the length of the country feel about possible financial choppy waters ahead that it can use it to inform journalism.
CNET is reporting that Twitter last week took an additional $15 million or $20 million in funding last week.
A source told News.com about the extra money being made available to the company.
Last summer it took a first round funding of $5 million.
The website of the New Scientist magazine will undergo a revamp after cutting a deal with development company Code to complete the makeover.
Code, which will work with in-house development team on the new site, will focus on improving usability, navigation and enhancing the site’s social media features.
The online edition of the title had its previous redesign in 2004.
Google’s Chewy Trewhella gave a presentation to the Telegraph developers day to show off the kind of things that can be done with the media giant's Google Earth feature through developing mash-ups and apps that run in conjunction with the mapping technology.
Despite the possibilities open to developers through the service, Press Gazette says, he admits that Google have had problems keeping people interested in the technology.
The good people at Readwriteweb explain how they use Twitter for journalism.
Pretty much the same as us at Journalism.co.uk - they say it falls into four distinct categories:
The discovery of breaking stories
People they follow tipping them off
Interviews
"When we got to interview Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW this year, we solicited interview questions via Twitter."
Quality assurance
Readers picking up on their factual errors.
Promotion
Tipping off the people that follow them
This week's addition of a video commenting feature to the TechCrunch website sparked copycat moves by a host of online publishers.
But it's not always a good idea, says RWW: they are less accessible, harder to moderate and can't be skim read for starters.
Media commentator Jeff Jarvis and Guardian America editor Michael Tomasky debate whether citizen journalists have the same responsibilities as a journalist when reporting news.
Jarvis: 'openness for all'
"With more openness and more reporting - by all - we will end up with more stories, the public will get more information, and politicians will learn that anything and everything they say and do can (and should) be reported," writes Jarvis.
Tomasky: Cit-j accounts need verification
"And very few journalists I know would favour '[hiding] anything from the public.' They would, however, favour not publishing something until it's verified. That's scarcely complicity in secret-keeping. That's just being responsible."
Europe's biggest newspaper publisher Axel Springer has announced plans to expand its internet and foreign prospects to recover from its loss-making move into the German mail-delivery business.
Last year the publisher bought up titles outside of Germany to lessen its dependence on the country's economy and newspaper industry.
Acquisitions online in 2007 included women's web portal producer AuFeminin.com SA, financial news site Wallstreet:Online and local news site Hamburg.de.
China has moved past the US as the country with the most internet users, it was reported by Chinese state media.
According to Reuters, Xinhua news agency quoted the China Internet Network Information Centre, claiming that the number of internet users in the country had risen to 221 million by the end of February - surpassing the number of internet users in the US for the first time.
A computer hacker has told a US court he was hired by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to develop pirating software - but denied trying to breach a rival satellite system.
Christopher Tarnovsky was giving evidence yesterday in a corporate spying case brought against the News Corp subsidiary NDS.
German publisher Bertelsmann AG i planning to publish what could be the first in a series of yearbooks whose content is derived from entries on Wikipedia.
According to the Associated Press, the company said it is planning a "One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia" starting in September with the content made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia.
News 24 Journalists and colleagues from radio and the TV news bulletins have become the first to move into the BBC’s new integrated newsroom and start work
According to the Press Gazette, the first stage of the project was completed on Monday.
International and World News staff will be phased in over the next few weeks, along with journalists covering the text-based areas of the BBC News website.
Mirror Group Newspapers will this week begin reporting traffic to its websites by making public the results of monthly ABCe.
Traffic for the People, Sunday and Daily Mirror will, for the first time, be judged against that of the other leading newspaper brands when the figures are released on Thursday- all accept for the Independent, which still refuses to make its traffic figures public.
According to the Guardian, Trinity Mirror has admitted to having some reservations about the ABCe methodology but is still playing ball.
It expects to record a high percentage of its traffic from a domestic audience - unlike the leading UK newspaper websites of The Guardian and The Mail, which draw the majority of their traffic from overseas.
Sites has used his own blog to break new ground in war reporting - the platform has freed him from the limitations placed on him as a freelance or correspondent.
The investigative journalist is a pioneer of multimedia reporting in the field, having led his own online video news show on Yahoo armed with only a laptop, satellite phone and video camera.
Ien Cheng, publisher and managing editor of FT.com believe that newspaper websites need to be more responsive to the whims of the web and act like technology companies - adapting to the almost constant changes of the online environment.
Guardian PDA highlights Cheng's strategic approach:
- Improving the development of new editorial products
- refining the subscription model
- changing the way the business works internally
The major disruption to Twitter last week was made all the more embarrassing by its huge popularity, says Charles Cooper, but are its recurring technical problems scaling the service a blip that Twitterholics will put up with?
Cooper doesn't think so, a word of warning from him:
"Is Twitter so addictive that we can't live without it? Don't believe the hype.
"I know a lot of tweet-deprived people who made it through the weekend in fine fettle.
"Remember what happened to Friendster? The service started to bog down and failed to recover in time.
"The upshot: It lost its mojo and its users defected to the likes of MySpace and Facebook."
Cooper adds that if the gremlins are dispatched from the Twitter machine then the service could have a bright future - but warns that the next fad is just round the corner if problems persist.
Speculation about Bloomberg placing a bid for the New York Times has been rife for some time, but don't believe the hype says Portfolio.
It quotes Bloomberg dismissing the speculation himself during a press conference yesterday in New York.
"I am not a newspaper person," Portfolio reported him saying.
"I know nothing about the production of a newspaper. I know something about reading it. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I don't. I buy it everyday retail. But I am not going into the newspaper business."
Newmediabytes has some good pointers for those journalists and subs looking to get their online headlines perfectly attuned for the search engines to home in on.
Main points (click through for detailed definitions)
- Be clear and concise
- Plan headlines for searchers
- Include appropriate keywords and keyword phrases
- Include FULL NAMES of people and places where applicable
- Include DATELINES
- Keep headlines under 65 characters
The site also has a video of DetNews.com web editor Leslie Rotan talking about some things to remember when writing headlines for the web.
Good Stuff.
Social network in a box, Ning, has raised 60m dollars in a fourth round of venture capital money from 'unspecified institutional investors' taking valuation of the company to 500m, according to Paid Content.
The company raised raised 44m last summer, which then valued the company at $170 million - says PC.
MySpace has launched a trail advertising platform across its site aimed at giving advertisers great control over what they do across the social network.
The Community Builder platform allows advertisers them to build and customise campaigns.
The platform also providers analytics to help gauge performance.
The FT's Alphaville blog has become the first recipient of the Harold Wincott Award for online financial journalism.
The annual ceremony recognises the best in financial journalism and inaugurate its prize for online journalism this year.
Google has revealed a 20 per cent growth in users clicking through to paid-for ads and a 31 per cent rise in profits to $1.31bn (£655m) - surprising many industry watchers expecting less encouraging growth.
The internet giant reported a profit after tax of $1.31bn (£655m) in the three months to March, with paid clicks rising by approximately 20 per cent on the first quarter of 2007, and 4 per cent over the fourth quarter.
A near ten per cent drop in print advertising revenue has caused the New York Times Co to register a loss in the first quarter - further highlighting the continued sharp decline of the US print newspaper industry.
The Times lost $350,000, or less than 1 cent per share, after recording a profit of $23.9m, or 17 cents per share, during the same period a year earlier - the FT said.
The company attributed the losses to a slowing economy compounding the overall struggle the newspaper industry is having as readers and advertisers migrate to the internet.
In the wake of last week's Ofcom report which suggested ITV could end its public service commitment , MPs have asked the broadcaster for clarification on its plans for regional news.
Chair of the culture committee, John Whittingdale, Conservative MP called for greater public funding to ensure future public service material broadcast on commercial TV remained the most viable option.
Not many details yet, but Reuters reports that French commercial broadcaster TF1 is suing YouTube for 100 million euros.
Commentary piece from Robert Niles:
"Let's just get this on the record - there is no such thing as "off the record" anymore"
Niles cites the Obama incident last week when he made a few off the cuff comments at an event with supporter where journalists supposedly were not allowed.
His comments then appeared - via a citizen journalist - on the Huffington Post's On The Bus campaign news site.
"With so many people publishing to blogs, Facebook pages and discussion boards, any professional news reporter who agrees to respect an "off the record" request at a meeting is committing an act of unilateral professional disarmament. I say... bag that. Don't tell organizers that you're a reporter. You're a citizen, too. Get in, and report on what you see, just like any other citizen would," says Niles.
Accreditation terms from the Indian Premier League have left specialist cricket websites out in the cold.
The sites will not be able to cover IPL matches, which start tomorrow, from inside the grounds.
They will also have to pay for images from officially sanctioned syndication services, rather than buying in from local news agencies, which traditional news groups are allowed to do.
The website of The Independent newspaper - one not know for its popularity, sophistication or embracing of the internet - has doubled its share of the UK online market over the last year, according to Hitwise.
"The market share of the UK Independent, which has traditionally lagged behind most of its rivals online, has more doubled over the last twelve months," wrote Robin Goad, research director, Hitwise UK.
"It was the seventh most visited website in our News and Media (Print section) in March putting it behind the Daily Mail, Times, Sun, Telegraph, Guardian and FT, but ahead of the Mirror and Express"
Hitwise measures the relative success of a website by the share of UK-based internet users it attracts over a given period.
