Ryan Sholin

Tag: Online News

  • Giving your sources blogs cuts out the middleman

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    Ryan Sholin
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    A few days ago, Dave Winer wrote: “I’ve said it many times before, it’s worth raising again. Any newspaper or radio or TV station with a good reputation in its community could embrace the fresh ideas of the bloggers in their community by offering free blogs to members of the community, who may be new…

  • Two Google News workarounds

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    Rob comments at Lost Remote: “I try to work around the Google News situation by posting almost all of our video content to YouTube. So far that’s one place where our content hasn’t been usurped by AP. We also are trying to blog breaking news – and sending automated updates to Technorati in the process…

  • Is your newspaper.com is a big ball of mud?

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Is your newspaper site a clean-looking, uniform grid of semantic (and validated!) code? Or is it a ‘big ball of mud,’ with includes (scotch tape) and javascript (bubble gum) holding together a jumble of disparate hunks of content? If you answered ‘YES’ to the first question, congratulations, you work at the New York Times, or…

  • A few basics of newspaper.com design

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I’m about 1/5th of the way through my latest run of Preliminary Data Gathering (cue ominous music as if the villain just walked into the bar) for my thesis, which involves staring at newspaper.coms just long enough to figure out where they hide the blogs. As I work my way down an alphabetical list of…

  • All I’m going to say about the Google/AP thing

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Google News now links to wire stories from the original source (AP, AFP, etc.), hosted by Google, in addition to the 5,137 versions of each wire story posted at individual news sites. Three reasons why this is good for newspapers: Newspaper.coms no longer have to spend time, money, and resources on trying to build the…

  • Mine, mine, it’s all mine!

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I want to save my favorite stories, right here, at your newspaper.com. Because really, what’s the sense in Digging a story about my neighborhood?

  • Three blog posts I haven’t had the time to write yet

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    Ryan Sholin
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    These are not un-busy times. Without further explanation or caveat, here are a few things kicking around in my head, if not necessarily in pixels just yet: What Are You Reporting On?: An explanation of the idea and how the Twitter ID, the Facebook group, the WordPress.com blog, the Knight News Challenge grant application, and…

  • Find yourself a nice comfortable niche and sell it like blueberry pancakes

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Did ya catch that headline? Don’t sell it like hotcakes, sell it like blueberry pancakes. Be specific. Let’s put that another way: Don’t be an international news service that decides it wants to appeal to the demographic of roughly 18-30. Sell to a niche, not a demographic. Local moms are a niche; Women are a…

  • The innovation gap: Your advertising department could use a hand

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…

  • Baltimore Homicides – baltimoresun.com

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    Ryan Sholin
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    That’s a good, clean homicide map. I like that it’s not muddled with any standard news site nav or templating, but at some point, someone’s going to ask us to put some ad positions in apps like this. Baltimore Homicides – baltimoresun.com