@andymboyle not every piece of journalism software is a public-facing news app built on deadline.
— jonathanstray (@jonathanstray) December 21, 2011
Tag: Online News
The newspaper that almost seized the future
The newspaper that almost seized the future: The amazing true story of digital innovation and atrophy over more years than you’d expect at the San Jose Mercury News, from CJR.
q&a: brian boyer on the plan for panda
q&a: brian boyer on the plan for panda: Ben Welsh talks with Brian Boyer about the ingredients for PANDA, a Newsroom Data Appliance.
PANDA will be a place for folks in the newsroom to stash their data, and a tool for helping reporters search and compare data sets.
Trust me, your newsroom needs a PANDA. Excited for this.
Best of Digital News Design Winners
Best of Digital News Design Winners: From March 2011, SND’s online news design award winners.
A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map
A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map: Alexis Madrigal, like many who have commented so far, are impressed with Tackable’s tablet news map app. Me, too.
A short list of things you might find useful
- A proposed new standard for semantic metadata in, say, online news stories.
- Michael Donohoe’s bucket list of things the New York Times could do, delivered shortly after he moved on to a new gig.
- If you’re not following Richard Koci Hernandez on Instagram, you’re missing out on a hypercreative stream of possibilities.
- A short instruction manual from CNN for success on the Web: Strengthen your core, then stretch yourself.
- On Wikipedia, all roads lead to Philosophy. And data visualization.
- The first rule of Tweet Club is exactly what you think it is.
- A book about responsive web design.
- How and why the Financial Times built a no-app-store-required HTML5 experience for tablets, and also, the future.
- The New York Observer redesigns online to showcase #longreads and scoops. (See also Stock and Flow.)
- Google ties together “rel=me” and authorship of things like news stories with a new bit of metadata.
Now, go build something useful.
Solid notes on the evolution of the beat
Solid notes on the evolution of the beat: A set of slides from Matt Thompson on the shift from “Stories to Streams.” Included: A briefly imagined alternate history of how the Enron story might break in 2011. You should follow Matt on Twitter.
DocumentCloud in action
DocumentCloud in action: Five examples from 10,000 Words, including uses from the Las Vegas Sun and PBS NewsHour.
Newspaper video lessons from The Miami Herald
Newspaper video lessons learned: How The Miami Herald cultivates loyal audience for video, its second biggest traffic driver. The short version: Breaking news, sports, weird local news, nothing your audience isn’t already reading about on your site or in your paper.
About that graphic comparing the Trenta to the stomach…
Charles Apple points to an explanation from Canada’s National Post, getting at the details of how the illustration you’ve clearly already seen — the one comparing Starbucks cup sizes to the average human stomach — from which we learn a bit about the convoluted nature of news today.
To summarize the sequence:
- Reuters moves a story on the Trenta.
- National Post graphic artist gets to work.
- National Post puts it on their blog.
- National Post puts it on their Tumblr.
- Graphic goes viral.
- Graphic shows up on CNN, where Anderson Cooper, not really up on the Canadian newspaper industry, credits the National Post with a sort of vague but enthusiastic attribution, calling it “a website.” Well, sure, but.
Perhaps the most interesting question about this, which Charles Apple asks: Did this graphic ever appear in print?
I’m not sure the answer matters, really, other than as evidence that you can create original content and drive loads of traffic (fleeting as it may be in this case) to your original content, even if it’s just an online illustration intended to gussy up an interesting wire story.
More fun questions: OK, so the traffic came and went, but did the National Post expand its reach by scoring some new Facebook fans, Tumblr followers, Twitter followers? Probably.
Ryan Sholin 