Wordle

Don't forget to do your web cloud of the class. I would think that there should be 15-20 words of various sizes based on the intensity in which they were talked about throughout the semester.

http://www.wordle.net/

Protecting the News Business Model

I applaud AP for doing this. It is ultimately something that has to be talked about and discussed because without some framework to capture funding for real journalism, there will be hobby journalism and a lot of opinion out there, but not much in-depth coverage. What are your thoughts? Could this bring benefits to the 24 hour news cycle? Is AP overstepping? Is it bad that I am copying and pasting AP's information about information protection?

The Associated Press and Intellectual Property Protection

The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year gathering and sharing news of public interest from around the world. Licensing of this content by our members is critical to support our news operations. In the new digital content economy, however, a significant amount of AP news and news from AP members is used without permission or fair compensation. This situation has serious consequences: it dilutes the value of news for licensors and advertisers; it fragments and disperses content so widely that consumers end up relying on fragmented coverage to get their news despite the availability of comprehensive and authoritative coverage on a 24-hour basis.

Recently, The Associated Press Board of Directors announced it would undertake an initiative to affirm the value of original news reporting and protect the news industry’s content from being misappropriated online. The initiative would find new ways to enhance consumers’ ability to find authoritative news coverage online. In addition, the AP Board asked AP to examine creation of a rights-based service that would ensure content owners and publishers earn a fair return on their news investments

1.Why is this newsworthy?

The action by the AP Board was an important acknowledgment by the news cooperative that it needs to adjust its practices and work together to keep original journalism economically viable by promoting licensed used of original news content and increasing direct consumer engagement with the sources of that news.

2. What do AP and the news industry want to accomplish?
Our mission is two-fold: enable consumers to find news from authoritative and original sources in the most flexible ways and to ensure that those who gather, report and publish the news are properly reimbursed for it.

3. Why is this important?
The organized news media perform a critical function in a free society. The news media protect the public’s right to know by enforcing freedom of information laws, sending reporters into war-torn regions and covering everything from natural disasters, local legislators and more to file unbiased reports. Pressing for government accountability and covering global conflicts have significant costs -- both financial and human. The Associated Press alone spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year in its newsgathering operation, covering everything from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to every statehouse in the United States. AP journalists must be present whenever and wherever news occurs, at great cost to AP, and sometimes at great risk to themselves. The same is true of every news organization. Safeguarding investments to gather and share news is critical to a democratic society.

4. What does the initiative involve?
Our goal is to improve consumers’ ability to find the most authoritative news coverage while also ensuring a fair return to those who invest in the original reporting of news. The initiative will involve a variety of steps, including something we refer to as search pages, or a “news guide” that would help point consumers to sources of original reporting. It also will involve creation of rights-based services to help publishers and those who originate news to facilitate new distribution and revenue models.

5. What is meant by “rights-based services"?
AP already processes text content from more than 1,100 news providers as part of its “Digital Cooperative” program. This effort assigns tags to the content that make it easier to search and sort news stories by category, location and individuals named, among other things. The rights-based service will enable new licensing models for news distribution and consumption. We believe this will encourage greater innovation in how authoritative news is delivered to the public.

6. What do you mean by “search pages”?
When consumers look for news today on search engines, they often get directed in a random fashion to a wide variety of news sources, blogs and other Web pages. Searches on breaking news topics such as floods, earthquakes and shootings don’t dependably produce results from authoritative local news sources, and often not even to those media responsible for producing the news stories. AP will work with its member newspapers, broadcasters and other media to create a set of search-optimized pages that will guide users to the most timely, authoritative coverage related to their searches

7. Is AP going to put up a “toll booth” around its content?
No. The AP initiative is about opening up clear routes to authoritative coverage. Our first priority is to engage the audience with original reporting from trusted sources. We expect online revenue models online to evolve, with some content supported by advertising and premium content priced for subscription or a la carte purchase by users.

8. Why not just harness the so-called “link economy” to attract the audience?
The world has benefited from the link construct of the Web. The AP initiative is not about prohibiting this. Instead, it is about making sure that consumers have access to authoritative news sources and that they can engage with news content in a more robust and timely way at the same time publishers and content owners receive a fair return on their investments in newsgathering and distribution.

9. What does AP mean when it says it will use both legal and legislative approaches to protect its content?
AP and the news industry are eager to work with everyone – including portals and aggregators -- in a constructive way to make sure content owners are fairly compensated for their work. Like any other business, we may need to seek legal and legislative help to safeguard our business interests.

10. Is AP trying to crack down on what many feel is fair use of news snippets?
As a newsgathering organization, AP understands the importance of fair use. Fair use is a complex analysis done on a case-by-case basis. It defies easy generalization. The AP initiative is not about this; it is about making it easier for consumer to access and engage with news content in more robust ways.

11. Is this aimed at Google? At bloggers?
No. It is not aimed at any one company or Web site. We are eager to work with everyone to achieve a fair solution.

Can In-Depth News Survive

First check out www.mediastorm.org. Read the blog post below from http://changingnewsroom.wordpress.com. Then comment on the truth that you find in the remarks. I think that this organization may be on to something.

Serious, Long-Form Multimedia Journalism that WORKS

Since it’s so rare to find good journalism-related news these days, I thought I would report one of the positive things I learned from the College Media Advisers conference last week in New York City.

One of the keynote addresses at this conference, attended by journalism students and their professors/adivsors, was by Brian Storm of MediaStorm, who was also incidentally the speaker at my recent Mizzou PhD graduation. Storm is a funny, irreverent, and new media savvy guy, and his small multimedia production studio produces freelance work for the likes of The Washington Post and National Geographic.

If you’ve never checked out the MediaStorm Web site, I would strongly urge you to do so. Breathtaking photography and exquisite multimedia storytelling on the extremely important issues, such as the legacy of Rwandan genocide, that mainstream news orgs are increasingly short on budget to produce:

Their storytelling philosophy, Storm said, is to let the subjects speak in their own words. They use on-screen text to connect the dots and drive the narrative, but the audio is in their sources’ own words. They combine stills and video to great effect and always incorporate some kind of surprise for the audience.

Great and all, right? But there’s two exciting take home messages for other news organizations that had me frantically taking notes on my iPhone during the speech.

PEOPLE CARE. THEY WATCH. Get this. I’m not making this up: They have a 65 PERCENT completion rate for one of their 21 minute videos. Meaning that 65 percent of those that start watching stick with it to the end. Unbelievable.

I’m one of several folks who have wondered of late how much proverbial bang for the buck news organizations are getting when they produce beautiful, slick multimedia packages. I love those pieces, in theory, but in reality, I often see them and feel overwhelmed by the time commitment. I confess that I want to be able to skim text, not sit down and actually watch something or play around with various options and links. I feel guilty about this because I deeply appreciate good journalism in all its forms, but it’s true, and I wonder how many others have a similar issue.

Does Storm have an answer for this? How does MediaStorm succeed in getting and keeping those eyeballs?

1. Quality, quality, quality. They are selective about the work they do, and they invest time and money in doing it RIGHT. No denying that’s a part of their success. But it’s not hard to convince journalists of THAT. Most I know are dreaming of being told that is true. Check out number two.

2. AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS. If you plunk a big time-consuming multimedia project on a Web site where people have come to expect relatively short news and feature stories they can skim over fast on their coffee break at work, or where they come to find local breaking news in bite-size chunks, they will feel just as I do - appreciative of your effort but too overwhelmed to take the time to really explore what you have to offer. Instead, think about creating a separate site for your very best work, where you can cultivate a different set of expections.

3. Put your content in front of people in as many ways and on as many platforms as possible. Make it easy for them to share it - via email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Get your techie folks to work hard on making sure the user experience is as seamless and non-frustrating as possible. For example, they include the code that allowed me to add that photo you see above in this post to this blog in a matter of seconds: Cut and paste. Once you’ve created that separate home for your high-quality stuff, push it out to the online world in as many ways as possible.

Yes, MediaStorm is a small organization, so I’m not arguing that what works for them would necessarily work to sustain a large newsroom. But the fact that they are doing well financially while doing serious, long form journalism is a reason for hope.

In Storm’s view, if you stick to your values, you’d be surprised by what just might happen. I couldn’t agree more. Embrace the future and all new media forms, but stick to your guns when it comes to the enduring journalism values of accuracy, quality, good reporting, and engaging storytelling — and I predict a positive long-term future.

Update on File Sharing Story

We talked weeks back about the creepy file-sharing guy that ran Pirate Bay in Sweden. Well, the courts decided that they will spend a year for illegal file-sharing. Was it the right decision? Are file-sharers criminals?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/5170170/Pirate-Bay-four-jailed-for-breaking-copyright-in-Swedish-file-sharing-trial.html

Bad Acting, Interesting Ideas

The video attached is a relatively long one, but it is the video to make up for the early dismissal this week. Please take some time to watch all of the video, and discuss some of the new ideas that Mozilla, the open source company, is looking to bring to the market. What would be the positive impact of these ideas? What companies or concepts should be worried about these developments? Do you see any downfall to these ideas? Be specific about the ideas from video as you reference them.

Solution to the Dying Newspaper???

Read the article from nytimes.com below and react to the movement known as hyperlocal news. Is this a good way to target customers or an effort ripe with concern because it could completely cocoon us in our own little world?

If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants.

Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing.

The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments. “Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.”

Of course, like traditional media, the hyperlocal sites have to find a way to bring in sufficient revenue to support their business. And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Some have shouldered the cost of fielding a sales force to reach mom-and-pop businesses that may know nothing about online advertising.

One problem is that the number of readers for each neighborhood-focused news page is inherently small. “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who has followed the hyperlocal market for a decade. “Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”

Still, said Peter Krasilovsky, a program director at the Kelsey Group, which studies local media, many small businesses have never advertised outside the local Yellow Pages and are an untapped online ad market whose worth his firm expects to double to $32 billion by 2013.

One of the most ambitious hyperlocal sites is EveryBlock, a six-person start-up in an office building in Chicago overlooking noisy El tracks, which is stitching together this hyperlocal future one city at a time. Backed by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, it has created sites for 11 American cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.

It fills those sites with links to news articles and posts from local bloggers, along with data feeds from city governments, with crime reports, restaurant inspections, and notices of road construction and film shoots. (The New York Times has a partnership with EveryBlock to help New York City readers find news about their elected officials.)

One day last week, the EveryBlock page for Adrian Holovaty, the company’s founder, showed that the police had answered a domestic battery call two blocks from his home and that a gourmet sandwich shop four blocks away had failed a city health inspection.

“We have a very liberal definition of what is news. We think it’s something that happens in your neighborhood,” said Mr. Holovaty, 28, who worked at The Washington Post before creating EveryBlock two years ago.

In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups. In the last several years, neighborhood blogs have sprouted across the country, providing the sites with free, ready-made content they can link to. And new tools, like advanced search techniques and cellphones with GPS capability, help the sites figure out which articles to show to which readers in which neighborhoods.

Unlike most hyperlocal start-ups, Patch, based in New York, hires reporters. It was conceived of and bankrolled by Tim Armstrong, the new chief of AOL, after he found a dearth of information online about Riverside, Conn., where he lives. Patch has created sites for three towns in New Jersey and plans to be in dozens by the end of the year.

One journalist in each town travels to school board meetings and coffee shops with a laptop and camera. Patch also solicits content from readers, pulls in articles from other sites and augments it all with event listings, volunteer opportunities, business directories and lists of local information like recycling laws.

“We believe there’s currently a void in the amount, quality and access to information at the community level, a function, unfortunately, of all the major metros suffering and pulling back daily coverage of a lot of communities,” said Jon Brod, co-founder and chief executive of Patch. This month, the home page of The Star-Ledger’s Web site, based in Newark, twice referred to articles first reported by Patch.

Outside.in publishes no original content. The company gathers articles and blog posts and scans them for geographical cues like the name of a restaurant or indicative words like “at” or “near.” An iPhone application lets users read articles about events within a thousand of feet of where they are standing. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, licenses feeds of links to big news sites that want to deepen their local coverage, like that of NBC’s Chicago affiliate.

Venture capital firms have invested $7.5 million in the company, partly on the bet that it can cut deals with newspapers to have their sales forces sell neighborhood-focused ads for print and the Web.

One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.

That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online.

But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.

“In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

Flash Mob

Zombie Flash Mob shuffles past Saks Fifth Avenue store

































Last week in class we talked about the flash mob. Many of you were new to the concept, and I was mentioning that I thought that the flash mob has grown up into something useful with the recent protests in Moldova. Is it possible that all of these new web tools have an infancy in which they are fun and interesting, but lack a larger social context or good. Do you think that other new, fun tools will grow into important pieces of our social fabric? Think of an example from the past where this has happened.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob

http://www.flashmob.com/