Tag innovation

Entries 34 Total

Links that redefine news

Feb 19, ’08 12:24 PM

Wednesday night, I’ll be speaking with Steve Sloan’s New Media class at San Jose State University.

I’m planning to show off some of the best of your work.

Yes, you.

I’m looking for online news sites and projects that stray from the traditional definition of news.

I’m assuming these journalism students get enough Gloom & Doom handwringers from other sources, and I have no intention of discouraging anybody from getting into this business, which needs all the help it can get.

So, here’s a list of links. Add your favorites in the comments.

I’m really just scratching the surface here, and notably absent are any multimedia tools and examples.  Add your favorites in the comments.

Consumption spreads faster today – The New York Times

Feb 11, ’08 11:31 AM

There’s a good graph here comparing the adoption of different technologies. Useful for presentations, school-related stuff. via kottke. (sidenote: the graphic credits Nicholas Felton, of amusing Annual Report lore.)

Consumption spreads faster today – The New York Times

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Introducing WiredJournalists.com

Jan 22, ’08 10:07 AM

WiredJournalists.com

At the end of 2007, Howard Owens* published a blog post outlining a year-long program he called 2008 objectives for today’s non-wired journalist.

A few of the objectives:

  • Become a blogger.
  • Start shooting your own pictures.
  • Do the same with video.
  • Join social networks.

Howard soon started fielding e-mails and requests for guidance from reporters looking to take him up on his offer of a $100 Amazon gift certificate for the first journalist to go from Zero to Everything as far as the list of objectives goes.

Howard, myself, and Zac Echola got together to start building WiredJournalists.com as a response to those calls for help.

From the Mission Statement:

“Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don’t need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

We are here to help each other learn basic skills and learn how new technology and new societal expectations for media are changing journalism.

At WiredJournalists.com we are all teachers and we are all students. We help each other and learn together. Those who know more should help those who know less. Those with questions should never be afraid to ask them.”

So please, come join this new community, but more than that, pass the link along to the guy in the next cubicle who doesn’t read blogs.

Pass it along to the photographer who hasn’t built a slideshow.

Pass it along to your editors, your teachers, and your students.

All are welcome.

*(Howard is my day-job boss.) 

A vote for change…

Jan 4, ’08 8:51 PM

We talk a lot in the circles I run in about a new skillset for reporters and about how a wired journalist in 2008 should be keeping up with the technologies and communities that are quickly looking like Michael Johnson in 1996, looking back at newspapers over their shoulder, smugly.

Yoni Greenbaum walks right into the glass office and says editors need a heaping bowl of New as well:

“If I was a publisher, corporate officer or even an employee, I would want an editor who is active online; who blogs and uses Facebook and MySpace; who has a digital camera and knows how use it and how to upload those images; who has a cell phone that use beyond just work emergencies; who knows how to identify Flash applet on a website; who knows that Ruby on Rails is not a MySpace band; who uses a newsreader; I could go on, but the point is the old skill set of paying their dues and being a wordsmith and possibly an amateur accountant just does not cut it anymore, honestly it hasn’t cut it for a long time.”

Plenty more where that came from.

If I were a reporter looking for work, I’d be looking for a gig somewhere where the editor has a GMail address for his or her personal e-mail. That’s a simple barometer, but the second I see a potential boss reach for the Hotmail bookmark in IE6 during an interview, I get a little queasy.

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Only hire the best.

Dec 24, ’07 11:16 AM

From Yoni Greenbaum, on the topic of outsourcing applications, the division of print and online newsrooms, and the hiring of online journalists:

“We all know that, increasingly, online is where the money is, but it will take talent to earn it. I would urge newspapers to make sure they’re paying their online employees appropriately; if new positions open, hire the best you can afford. This is one place where you don’t want to go with the lowest bidder and more importantly, this one place where wrestling with a difficult issue and ultimately making the bad choice won’t do.”

I’ll take that next step: Newspapers should be hiring reporters who can work in more than one medium. As we repeat over and over again, the days of the one-tool player are long, long gone.

If you want to work in this business, pick up at least one Web skill, or best of luck to you and your print clips.

Five ways to innovate today

Nov 28, ’07 6:29 AM

A colleague looking for a few new ways to integrate free Web services into his newsroom asked me to chip in with a list of five, so here they are. A note to student journalists: These are all free and easy ways to get something new and different online, and they probably serve a need you have right now in your newsroom.

NING:
Instant social networking for a niche in your community. Need a high school football site? A way to let readers weigh in on a controversial issue without allowing too much anonymity? A place for school clubs to run groups, slideshows, video, blogs and forums? Done. This thing is plug and play. Move around the modules as you please, and promote the crap out of it on your news site. For 5 bucks a month, use your own URL. For $20 a month, run your own ads.

VUVOX:
Fun, inventive multimedia, with Zero Flash Knowledge required at the door. Heck, you don’t even need to know how to use an FTP program to get this to work. Play with images, audio, and video here, and embed the results on your own site. Check out this ScobleShow video of Richard Koci Hernandez from the San Jose Mercury News talking about using Vuvox.

TWITTERGRAM:
One of many projects on the plate of the guy who pretty much invented RSS and blogging and podcasting as we know it. The basic premise is that you call a phone number and record a short message. A link to the resulting mp3 file gets posted to your Twitter stream. Keep in mind that your Twitter stream has an RSS feed, as well, which increases the number of games you can play on the tail end of this. Think of it as live audio reporting that gets fed straight to the Web.

MOGULUS:
The latest in a short line of live video streaming startups. Also consider Kyte.tv. If you’re reporting with a laptop in your backpack hooked up to a webcam (or a more expensive miniDV camera, whatever floats your A/V boat), this is a way to broadcast live via the Web, whether you hook into wifi at the coffee shop or an EVDO card to get online.

YOUTUBE:
YouTube? What? How many different remixes of Soulja Boy can I watch involving Spongebob and/or kittens? Or, you could use your free video editing software (iMovie, Windows Movie Maker) to create video content (ahem), podcasts, or audio slideshows. No FTP access or Soundslides license? No problem: Edit your images and audio in iMovie and export it as a video file. Upload to YouTube, embed on your site, and voila, audio slideshow. Podcasting? Why not do the same trick with a few relevant photos over an audio track?

Take advantage of the free software and services that are out there: None of these will create compelling content for you or teach you how to be a better storyteller. What they will do is make it easy for you to deliver those stories to your audience in compelling and interactive ways.

Web Editors Reveal Online Flops or Failures – E & P

Aug 27, ’07 10:30 AM

Notes on failure: “But with those accomplishments and expansions have come no shortage of starts and stops, bumps, flops, and sometimes outright debacles.”

Web Editors Reveal Online Flops or Failures – E & P

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The innovation gap: Your advertising department could use a hand

Jul 27, ’07 9:35 AM

So here we all are.

In the newsroom, in j-school, in our little corner of the blogosphere, producing great journalism, training great journalism students, and pointing out fantastic examples of both to each other and our peers, doing our best to make the transition to online news.

One problem.

We forgot to bring the advertising department to the party.

Yeah, sure, as journalists, it’s not really our job to figure out how to monetize this stuff.

That’s what we tell ourselves as we post our multimedia projects without templates that include ad positions. That’s what we tell ourselves while print revenue declines — and online doesn’t grow anywhere near fast enough to make up for it.

Alright, so without going too far into whether journalists are supposed to be thinking about this or not, here are five ways to improve online advertising revenue at your newspapaper.com. (How’s that for burying the lede?)

  1. Embrace contextual advertising: Make AdSense your friend. Spread a little around your article pages: It’s like free money falling from the sky and not nearly as annoying to your users as giant Flash banners. And it loads faster.
  2. Go big, cut down on ad positions, and charge more for display ads: Let advertisers feel like they are buying a full page print ad opposite your content. Use giant 300xwhatever skyscrapers that are practically like a sponsorship for the page, and let that be the only display ad on the page. Charge far more for that exclusive spot, and sell it to your big full-page type clients.
  3. Target affiliate programs to relevant pages: Do I want to sign up for Netflix while I’m reading a crime story? Maybe not, but sell me on iTunes and Netflix from your music and movie review pages, and maybe I’ll bite. That goes double for travel site ads on your travel pages. The near future of affiliate ads is widget-based ads where your users will be able to sign up for a service or buy a product without leaving your page. Keep it relevant and your conversion rate should only go up.
  4. Sell more than eyeballs: The page view is dead, but the CPM model of online ad sells lives. That can’t be right, right? Find something to sell to your clients: Relevance, demographics, most popular stories and sections, a chunk of syndicated/wire content that is a huge hit in your town. Dig into the numbers and make something work.
  5. Party together: If your ad sales staff doesn’t know what ad positions are available online, or doesn’t pay enough attention to the news site to know what lots of people are looking at without seeing local advertising, you need to get together, form a committee, have some meetings, and just generally talk to each other. Even if your desk is in the newsroom. Seriously, this isn’t going to work unless the smartest people in the building sit down together and make it happen. If you really think your journalism is going to be affected by letting the ad department know there’s room for a 5-second preroll ad position on all that video you’re shooting, you might be in the wrong business.

So now it’s your turn, of course. What’s the smartest bit of online advertising you’ve seen at a newspaper.com lately — or better yet — what’s the smartest thing going on in online ads anywhere right now that you think we should let our sales staffs know about?

Further reading: Scott Karp’s been all over this territory recently. Start here, and work your way into it.

5 Quick Tips for Making Online Innovation Happen – web.aan.org

Apr 25, ’07 9:46 AM

“Sometimes, thinking of a great meta-strategy is too-much – too overwhelming, too expensive, too far out of reach. Identify a small improvement that can be made, and get it done this week.” via Mindy.

5 Quick Tips for Making Online Innovation Happen – web.aan.org

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Making innovation work at newspapers – Jay Small

Mar 3, ’07 2:05 PM

This is a great high-level read for executives and publishers anywhere in the news business.

Making innovation work at newspapers – Jay Small

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