PaidContent: Netscape.com To Be Relaunched As a Digg-Like Site; Calacanis Heading It: The storied Netscape.com will be revived again by AOL, and will relaunch soon as a Digg-like user-driven news/aggregation site with Jason Calacanis at the helm, sources have told paidContent.org.
This is a brilliant idea. For most people the name “Netscape” is still somewhat synonymous with the Internet. Jason has the energy and ideas to pull this off.
UPDATE: THIS SURVEY IS NOW CLOSED. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE IT.
A graduate student from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government is conducting an intriguing survey about citizen media. In her own words:
Blogs, Wikis, Flickr, RSS — the list keeps growing of technology and innovations that help people share their voices and knowledge. In particular, new kinds of collaborative news sites are leveraging these tools. Wikinews, OhmyNews and Digg, among many others, have sparked both enthusiasm and controversy.
I’m a graduate student in the Kennedy School at Harvard, and am looking for users of collaborative news sites. This research project seeks to get a better understanding of why people use — and how they value — these collaborative news sites.
You can help by participating in this short, anonymous 5-minute online survey. Click the link to Share What You Think.
If you have time, please participate.
I’m giving a talk and joining a discussion this evening at Worcester State College in Massachusetts. If you’re in the area, come on by…
Hottest media platform of the hour? Video. Online video. The recent launch of Google Video, major sales of TV episodes on iTunes, and growing popularity of sites like YouTube.com suggest that video streaming technology is finally good enough to make video content on the Internet worth our time. Short and often high-quality videos (which will inevitably grow in length) can be found on just about any topic – obscurity is not a factor. The New York Times coined this phenomenon as “slivercasting.”
But traditional media companies have noticed the trend, too, and are making attempts to keep up. A number of newspapers around the country have recently announced plans to incorporate more video content into their offerings:
While these newspapers are proving themselves to be more ambitious than many of their competitors, the media industry as a whole has recognized the growing importance of video journalism. Last fall, the Press Association of the U.K. began running a training program for British newspaper journalists on the basics of video reporting. This “videojournalism bootcamp,” run by David Dunkley Gyimah, who teaches Digital Journalism at the University of Westminster, instructs print journalists on the art of “visual storytelling” in an intensive two-week training session. Editors’ Weblog has an interview with Gyimah and Paul Hartley, Associate Editor of the Hull Daily Mail, one of the British papers enthusiastically encouraging its reporters to sign up.
On March 1, the Associated Press announced the launch of the AP Online Video Network (APOVN), which “draws on the global newsgathering resources” of the AP to produce video capsules of the top news stories around the world.
So what’s in it for the news business? Well, first of all, it’s pretty clear that as more people move online, expectations for multimedia presentations of the news are growing. Readers are responding to new opportunities to interact with traditional news content in non-traditional ways (such as photo galleries, podcasting, message boards, etc.). If these media organizations want to appeal to their readers, they need to adapt to these raised expectations and provide their audience with high-quality content in every medium.
Professional journalists are learning to use video to report stories in a new way, which is good news, but what about the amateurs? The popularity of sites like YouTube, which consists of user-submitted and user-generated video clips, indicates that people are eager to participate in content creation. If newspapers and magazines can leverage this enthusiasm and get citizen reporters to contribute their video content, in addition to first-hand reporting and on-the-scene photography, I think they’ll find some really good content that has the potential to enrich their offerings substantially.
Coming soon: Video: The Re-Rising Star (Part Two). I’ll be spotlighting a handful of new Internet video projects being undertaken by some of the major television networks.
The UK’s Guardian newspaper launches its ambitious new collective blog today, Comment is free:
Comment is free is a major expansion of Guardian comment and analysis on the web. It is a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read.
In addition to having regularly updated postings by Guardian staffers and guest contributors, as well as reader feedback and commentary, Comment is free will also feature an editors’ blog, photo blog, blog roll, cartoons, and editors’ favorite posts.
Editor Georgina Henry says that the inspiration for Comment is free comes from Huffington Post, which she writes has “outstripped its liberal old media competitors in the 10 months since it launched.” Interestingly, Henry clearly identifies the Guardian as “old media” and suggests that Comment is free is the traditional newspaper’s attempt to “embrace the energy, passion and immediacy of the blogging revolution.”
Looks like a very cool project, let’s hope it’s successful.
Rich Wiggins: How to Spam Google News. Pretend you’d like to appear in the news. Imagine that there might be a way for you to write a story — a story about anything, any topic under the sun — and have your tale appear in a news archive. It turns out that you can. It’s trivial. Just type your story into one of the Internet-based “PR agencies” that Google News includes in its index, and poof, your story is part of the news.
Let’s see how long Google leaves open this absurd hole in the system. Maybe they should have left the “Beta” tag on the site…
Arguably among the most ambitious newspapers with respect to online development, The Washington Post has been experimenting with new web technologies and is encouraging its readers to engage with the paper’s content in creative ways.
First, the Post Remix.
As the “Official Post Mash-up Center,” Post Remix has two goals:
- To spotlight the work of outside Web developers who’ve made cool and interesting projects (“mashups”) using Post content.
- To provide information about washingtonpost.com’s various data offerings (APIs and RSS feeds).
This initiative clearly illustrates the Post’s willingness to try new things and be open to alternative modes of presenting news and information. WashingtonPost.com’s Adrian Holvaty explains that they are undertaking this kind of project, “Because we want to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web.”
Second, “Bookmark to del.icio.us”
The Washington Post is among a small number of publications which have incorporated a “Bookmark to del.icio.us” button at the bottom of every article. This feature allows readers to tag and organize the pieces they find interesting, making it easier to reference these links again at a later point. Because this feature enables readers to actively engage and interact with the content, publishers are really doing themselves a favor.
Third, Technorati-powered links.
Every Washington Post story features a box labeled “Who’s Blogging,” which lists all of the blogs that are discussing that topic and actively linking to the article. These boxes also include a list of the most blogged about articles – both on Washingtonpost.com and on the web as a whole.
The Post’s own robust collection of blogs has earned it second place in the “Best Blogging Newspapers in the U.S.” rankings, a list compiled by Jay Rosen and his journalism students at NYU.
[Disclosure: I have a relative who is an executive at the Washington Post Company.]
From the Project for Excellence in Journalism: The State of the News Media 2006. Extraordinarily detailed and thoughtful. Do not miss.
I’ll be giving a talk, entitled The Democratization of Media, a week from today at the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
Mercury News: Knight Ridder sold to McClatchy. McClatchy Co. announced today that it will acquire Knight-Ridder for approximately $6.5 billion, and plans to sell 12 of the San Jose newspaper company’s 32 papers, including the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times. The deal was valued at $67.25 a share — $40 of that in cash and the rest in McClatchy shares. The Sacramento-based company is also assuming $2 billion in Knight Ridder debt. McClatchy chief executive Gary Pruitt called the deal “a vote of confidence in the newspaper industry.”
This is a sad day in many ways, at best bittersweet.
I joined Knight Ridder in 1988, moving to the Detroit Free Press (since acquired by Gannett) from a Kansas City paper that later became part of Knight Ridder. In 1994 I joined the Mercury News, where I stayed for more than a decade.
Moving to Knight Ridder was a deliberate career move. I was joining a company that visibly cared about journalism, about the honorable craft of helping citizens understand their communities, nation and world — being an annoying watchdog for the people, keeping an eye on powerful interests and, to a small degree where possible, keeping them more honest.
The Mercury News from 1994-2000 was exhilarating. We were one of the few American newspapers that was growing — we were building something wonderful, an organization that for a time did some of the best tech coverage of any news operation, and we all knew it. The bubble burst, and the Merc bowed to business reality by abandoning its ambition. Yet even today the paper boasts some of the best journalists I’ve known anywhere, people who did not give up, who will never give up.
Under Tony Ridder, Knight Ridder did make many cutbacks that I found disturbing. But I know he cared about journalism, and he spent more on his newsrooms than rival media companies like Gannett or MediaNews — much more. Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau has distinguished itself as just about the only news organization that dared to stand up to the Bush administration’s press bullying during the Iraq war, telling the truth and being joined after the fact by the New York Times, Washington Post and others that should have been leaders, not followers in telling truth to power.
I hope McClatchy’s obviously sound instincts, in business and journalism, continue with the enlarged company. Having met and chatted with some of their senior folks, and admiring the journalists I know there, I’m fairly confident that McClatchy will do well. But it faces the same economic pressures that forced Knight Ridder to cave in to speculators and other investors for whom journalism is an abstraction — an unfortunate cost of being in business — and certainly not a priority.
I’m not nostalgic for what many newspapers have become: empty journalistic vessels working mostly for the advertisers and shareholders, only vaguely interested in serving the people of their communities. But when newspapers do their best, they are vital parts of those communities, and we need quality journalism more than ever.
No industry has a guaranteed right to exist, much less thrive. Capitalism and basic human change assure that. Maybe newspapers are going to disappear sooner than later (they will disappear eventually). We need to find ways to preserve what they do best — when they’re convening the community conversation, watchdogging the powerful, telling truth so an informed citizenry can make good decisions. If newspapers don’t evolve, quickly, we’ll have to find other ways of serving the public and each other. I hope they do evolve, because they are institutions that matter.