Links for today | Links para hoje

• A lesson worth learning: 5 tips for building a successful hyperlocal site, Editor’s Weblog

The key guidelines for a hyperlocal site are reportedly as such:

1. Skilled staff is imperative- a functioning site requires the input of both content and technological minds. Contributors need to be dedicated to the cause and integrated within the larger organisation.

• Let’s Screw Up the Entire Internet to Save Newspapers, Gawker

You can copyright a news story, but you can’t copyright the news. “The news” just means “things that happen in the world.” What would it mean, in practice, to make it illegal to paraphrase a copyrighted news story? Summing up, for example, political events, or a sports controversy, or even a fashion trend, could be interpreted as paraphrasing copyrighted material. So let’s ban talking about anything. And banning links will help us make our references even more obscure, by making it impossible for anyone to refer to source materials! Good idea, Posner. This gross oversimplification makes you look none too freedom-loving!

• Multimedia apps for journalists, Adam Westbrook for Innovative Interactivity

A small blog article about two months ago proved to be one of the most successful in the five years I’ve been blogging. It listed a dozen or so free applications available on the internet to help multimedia journalists create great pieces.

Well a revision is well overdue; there’s a few of the old ones, which I’ve really enjoyed using, plus many new ones. As always this isn’t a comprehensive list, but these are ones which, to have in your arsenal, give you great potential as a multimedia journalist.

• A free-lance prototype: multimedia and entrepreneurial, OJR

The University of Virginia prepared Jason Motlagh very well for his career has a free-lance foreign correspondent.

When he applied to take a journalism elective course, he was rejected because he wasn’t an English major. When he applied for a job as food columnist at the school paper, he was also rejected.

But Motlagh persisted, and eventually won a spot on the school paper as travel columnist. His specialty: Travel to fascinating world spots on very low budgets.

Voila. Today Motlagh has five years of free-lance foreign  correspondence under his belt and, in many respects, he is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget.

• Is Outlawing Links A Way To Save Newspapers?, Sean P.Aune

For those of you unfamiliar with the theory of linking and how it works, it’s a fairly simple concept.  Take me linking the word “TechCrunch” above.  I chose to link to the actual story Ms. Schonfeld wrote, so now when this post is published he will receive a notice called a “trackback” that allows him to know that I referenced his article in my post.  This will also be used by search engines to see how relevant his post is and how much credence they should give it.  The more links a site or story receives, the more importance a search engine puts on it, and the more chance of people searching on the appropriate terms will see it.

Essentially, links are the life’s blood of blogging.

• Rupert Murdoch’s War On Bloggers Explodes,  American Blog

John Hartigan is full of shit. Bloggers have gone to jail for their work, and to protect their sources, in North Korea, Iran, Egypt, the list of countries persecuting bloggers grows longer by the week. And the CEO of Australia’s biggest news corporation doesn’t know this?

The jailing of bloggers for speaking too much truth is obviously not the kind of news that John Hartigan, a Rupert Murdoch CEO, is interested in. How could he not know about those jailing and prosecutions.

Links for today | Links para hoje

• Suicide ain’t painless, Playing the Game (Real Adventures in Journalism)

Today I witnessed the ultimate death of my newspapers.
The money hungry whores who pay themselves vastly inflated salaries to run this company have signed the death warrant and now it is just a matter of time before the advertisers carry out their wishes.
In their infinite wisdom, my so-called bosses decided to reduce pagination over summer in order to cut costs. So far so sensible. It is a season where newspapers are always likely to make a loss. I expected to lose a few editorial pages as part of this drop in size and was actually looking forward to taking the foot off the gas a little and having a bit of fun.
The plans for my new editions landed on my desk this morning and to be honest I felt like walking out there and then.
Instead of a few back of the book pages being dropped, the fucktards in charge have fundamentally destroyed the layout of my papers.

• Build an Insanely Great Web Service, ReadWriteWeb

Here is what an insanely great Web product looks like to the average user right now and through the next 3 years:

• 30 seconds: “I get it.”
• 3 minutes: “I’ve used it and still get it, and it has not annoyed me yet.”
• 3 days: “I find this really useful or fun.”
• 3 weeks: “I am raving about this to other people.”
• 3 months: “I couldn’t imagine not having this, and I’m boring my friends telling them about it.”
• 3 years: “How weird to see this on Oprah.”

• The Fundamental Training Need, The Scoop

One of the common responses to such entreaties is exemplified in this comment, which includes this plea: “I understand the need to bolster one’s skill set. But what happened to the days when we actually, you know, worried about reporting rather than slavishly trying to master every piece of technology?”

If only that was the real problem.

• 10 things you need to understand to save journalism, Justin MacLachlan

Stop thinking of your Web site as the online newspaper. It is it’s own, an entity with more power to engage and retain your readers than any medium in history. By the time I’ve visited your site a second time, it should already know what stories I like to read and it should be serving those up to me — without my asking. Make what I want not easy to find, but impossible to miss. The internet can do that, you know.

• Yet another “What if you go online-only?” scenario, Nieman Journalism Lab

This question keeps getting asked in various ways: “What if you just stopped printing the newspaper and went online-only? How many people would you need, what would your costs be, and could you earn enough revenue to make a profit?”

It’s not necessarily the right question, because there’s still life left in print. An online-print hybrid, with one or two days a week of printed distribution tied to a strong digital publishing operation, is probably a much better solution than online-only.

• Death Knell for Mainstream Newspapers, Intellectual Conservative

Print journalism today, and by that I mean daily newspapers, stands at a bloody crossroads. Those who practice it must come to grips with realities, such as all the whys behind the decline in readership, thus circulation, and not continue to espouse their personal agendas, or show favoritism to their ideological pals. (And by all means, they ought to stop slobbering over their Man in the White House. Enough already!)

Yes, it’s a crackpot theory, I realize, that the prime function of journalism is to inform the public impartially, without fear or favor. Color me naive. Casting that delusion aside, journalism suffers today from chronic, life-threatening credibility gaps amidst plummeting daily circulations. Result: Cutbacks, suspended publication, bankruptcy for some. Some wags might say fine, good riddance, but the loss of daily newspapers plainly sucks. It leaves a hole in the ether of how and where we get our news, however mangled or tainted.

3 somewhat related posts | 3 posts mais ou menos relacionados

Twitter, news, Iran, citizen journalism and how journalists fit in the news process, all in three posts that reflect the new news logic.

Twitter, notícias, Irão, jornalismo do cidadão e como os jornalistas se encaixam no processo informativo, em três posts que reflectem a nova lógica noticiosa.

• How to verify a tweet

Twitter is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers or 10,000, you can break news. That’s because all tweets are recorded and indexed at search.twitter.com. If someone types the right keyword(s), they can find your tweet.

Breaking Tweets prides itself on giving many different types of Twitterers credit for breaking news, whether it be someone in Honduras with a dozen followers recording the first “earthquake” tweet or a news organization providing the first details of a major story.

But how do you know a tweet’s legitimate?

• Iran: When journalists can’t be heard, how successful can citizen journalism be at providing back-up?

In the absence of an abundance of professional reporters, amateurs have stepped up. One of the most watched and discussed videos to come out of the tragedy, and one which is emblamatic of the role of citizen journalism in reporting from Iran, is that of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman who was walking near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators when she was shot. The video has prompted international outcry and the girl’s death has since come to represent the tragedy of the conflict, a “symbol of the anti-government movement,” according to the New York Times. It was taken, not by a reporter with a camera, but by a bystander on a mobile phone, and posted on Facebook and YouTube after the man sent the 40-second clip to a friend who then forwarded to friends and news sites in Europe and the US.

• Editor claims Twitter ‘humanises’ journalists

At a discussion on Twitter’s impact on media and journalism, Colgan claimed that journalism has “never been healthier” with Twitter a powerful reporting tool. “It enables you to gather and distribute information very quickly and make it common property of the nation and the world,” he said.

He added, that by allowing journalists to express themselves personally and professionally on Twitter, can “humanise” the writer and make them more accountable. He said:  ”As professionals, our job is to try and be objective. It makes journalists accountable. You’re not just doing your job in public you’re doing a whole lot of other things in public. I think it’s a positive thing for journalism.”

But he stressed that tips sourced from Twitter still need to be checked as it is a new form of source. “The dynamic has changed to how people report on the web whether it be by Tweet or longer blog post or by aggregating a whole lot of opinion. When it comes to reporting on the web, verifying information still remains paramount,” Colgan said.

See how neatly we are directed right back to the top? Other thing: back in the presentation i gave at a convention in Guimarães, i said that journalists are becoming news traffic controllers, and media outlets are becoming more and more aggregators than generators of information, being one of the final steps of the news cycle. Now and then i don’t feel so lonely in the world.

Viram a maneira catita como somos reenviados para o início? Outra coisa: na apresentação que fiz na convenção em Guimarães, disse que os jornalistas tornaram-se controladores de tráfego informativo, e que as empresas de media são cada vez mais agregadores do que geradores de informação, sendo uma das etapas finais do ciclo de informação. De vez em quando não me sinto assim tão sozinho.

Links for today | Links para hoje

The evolution of Online Journalism

• Life after death: newspapers and the re-invention of paper technology, Knight Digital Media Center

In a world of infinite information, it would seem that providing context is more relevant than ever. Investigative journalism, the detective agency of the people, has acted as a “watchdog” presence, independent of government and big business, since its inception. Literary journalism, often bundled with terms like “long form” and “feature,” has meant sociological understanding and on-the-ground experience of the human condition in all its varying colors.

• Shift Index, Deloitte

The Center for the Edge has unveiled its most significant report to date: “The Shift Index” which suggests the current recession is masking long-term competitive challenges for U.S. businesses. Among the key findings, U.S. companies’ return on assets (ROA) have progressively dropped 75 percent from their 1965 level despite rising labor productivity. Even the highest-performing companies are struggling to maintain their ROA rates and increasingly losing market leadership positions.The index is the result of a nearly year-long effort applying a combination of established and original analytical approaches to four decades of data, some of it pre-existing and some created for the first time. More than a dozen data sources were engaged, four surveys were developed and deployed, and five proprietary methodologies were created to compile 26 metrics into three indices representing 15 industries.

• Google Games Bite Newspapers, Gawker

Desperate for online advertising, newspapers have learned to aggressively optimize their content for Google. The result: more traffic. Junky traffic.

Readers tend to spend gobs and gobs of time on newspaper sites. Indeed, their level of engagement has been print journalism’s strongest asset online, but that’s changing: According to data from Nielsen Online, readers are spending less time on top newspaper websites, including six minutes less per month at Washingtonpost.com, one minute less per month at USAToday.com and a minute and a half less per month at NYTimes.com.

• Don’t Let Yellow Press Standards Define the Future of Journalism, ReadWriteWeb

In the debate on the future of journalism, bloggers say, “We have a better economic model. The future is digital, and we are the future, so whatever we do is right.” Traditional journalists, mourning a passing world, say, “We defined how journalism works, and everyone should adhere to that model, even if it won’t work economically.” This is a gross simplification of the arguments flying back and forth. But sadly, it is a dialogue of the deaf. Neither party seems to want to listen or learn from the other.

• Less is more. The tweet(ed) revolution., Matter/Anti-Matter

The anger at CNN may have been collateral damage of Twitterers’ frustration due to having only limited impact over the events in Iran. But the effect was impressive: Within a couple of hours, #cnnfail became one of the top trending topics on Twitter, CNN was faced with a major image backlash, and you could follow the development live on Twitter. Twitter effectively acted as “media watchdog,” as Mashable commented. Citizen journalism outperformed professional journalism — in real-time. When Ahmadinejad shut down all mobile services and social networks, only a few Iranian Twitterers, with just the trusted authority of a genuine voice, were able to stay connected to the rest of the world and report on the frightening events in Iran. Synchronicity, real-time reporting, should have been CNN’s bastion but it didn’t get any of this. Twitter did.

• Which daily newspapers performed well on the weekly Web site innovation report card? Find out!, Scooping the News

Scooping the News evaluated the following five newspaper Web sites on their design/navigation, accessible archives, reader presence, in-depth reporting and evidence of continuous updates. Each newspaper received a score ranging from 1 to 4 based on changes in its Web site from five years ago to present (1 = no change, 2 = limited innovation, 3 = good innovation and 4 = significant innovation). The total of those scores provides an innovation composite score.

• Google Mining

Links for today | Links para hoje

• How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors, Ross Dawson

5. The symbiosis of mainstream media and Twitter

I have written numerous times about the symbiosis of mainstream media and social media– each feeds on the other. I also used this metaphor as a central element of my Future of Media Strategic Framework below.

This is and should be exactly the relationship between mainstream media and Twitter. Absolutely, Twitter largely feeds off established media channels. In fact it is rapidly becoming one of the most important ways for people to assess which mainstream media stories they choose to read. Twitterers select what’s most interesting, and then often comment on it, creating real-time conversations out of a static media piece.

However mainstream media is feeding off Twitter too. As Twitter grows its user base it is becoming not just a source of breaking news, but also a deep and broad indicator of sentiment and social change. News stories are not all about cataclysmic events, but also about how we are changing as a society. Journalists who do not look to Twitter as an early indicator or potential source of stories are missing a great opportunity to tap the zeitgeist.

• Knocking Down Barriers for Newspapers to Try New Technologies, Dan Schultz – MediaShift

Some Workarounds

The above list may seem depressingly long, but never fear! There are ways to fake flexibility and nimbly try new things. Although I can’t speak from experience, I’m going to throw a few ideas out there — take ‘em or leave ‘em.

Start Small — Since the dawn of time, people have found ways to lessen the blow when dealing with large scale projects: developers make prototypes, web applications have closed betas, and cavemen probably made miniature wheels before trying full-sized ones. Not everything needs to be launched full-featured and full-scale up front. Pick a small group of people to try the new internal project first, or set up a smaller portion of the feature set, or just use default settings instead of spending hours tweaking to perfection. Doing these things will give you time to work out kinks, get feedback, and figure out how/if the new service might be used before you spin your wheels.

• Creating value when everyone is a journalist, Pat Thornton @ BeatBlogging.org

Many journalists — whether they choose to admit it or not — are scared of trying to make a living in a world where anyone can report.

It’s true that the Web, smartphones, social media, blogs, etc are making it easy for everyone to report and share their stories, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a need for professional journalists. In fact, I’d argue that citizen journalism, while helping to cover the world better, only highlights the need for professional journalists.

Over the past few days, I’ve extolled the virtues of social media in covering the unrest in Iran. True, without social media, this story might not be told properly, but there still has been a large need for professional reporters.

• UK: Half of nation’s local and regional papers will be lost within five years, according to Enders Media, Editor’s Weblog

The launch of a cross-party select committee’s investigation into the future of newspapers in the UK today was overshadowed by the ominous prediction that half of the nation’s local and regional papers will be lost within the next five years.

The predictions are based on research conducted by the media analysts, Enders Media.  Its founder, Claire Enders, voiced her concerns in front of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee this morning:

“We are expecting that up to half of all the 1,300 titles will close in the next five years.”

• Prague, Futuroom, and the new hyper-local news hybrid,  Lo-Fi Hi-Style

In the beginning, I thought that all a newspaper had to do to save itself was to embrace multimedia and video.  However, after being a proponent of this approach for over three years, I began to see that this was also not working. Newspapers were still dying and it seemed there wasn’t a heck of a lot anyone could do about it.

Newspapers were becoming obsolete because of the medium on which they are printed:

• Newspapers take a lot of capital to create. Think: printing presses, ink, trucks, man-power.
• Newspapers do not allow for comments, hyperlinks, video, or real-time updates. It’s a one-way conversation.
• Newspapers are out of date the minute they are delivered.

By all measures, the newspaper is inferior to the instant delivery of news over the Internet and mobile phones because the news is trapped in the inferior medium of PAPER.

• Newsrooms should open their doors to job-seeking journos, Journalism 2.0

NPR has an interesting piece on a small ad agency in New York that has opened its doors to those in the profession who are looking for work. The job seekers get a place to research job opportunities and a place to network. The ad agency gets more sounding boards for new ideas and, occasionally, more new ideas from the job seekers.

Seems like a model some newsrooms, with plenty of extra desk space these days, should entertain.

• To link, or not to link?, StarNewsOnline (via MartinStabe.com)

The Web is a lot different than a print edition. When you are holding a newspaper in your hands, that’s the only source of information you have accessible to you at that moment. When you are on the Web, you are always just one click away from more, and sometimes better, information.

Of course, we always want the stories we produce to be the best available, but we shouldn’t be afraid to give our readers a broader perspective by linking out to others, even when we consider them competitors.

Earlier today, I read a blog post by Ryan Sholin, the director of news innovation at Publish2, a company that creates tools to help journalists to use links as a basic part of their reporting process.

Sholin quotes Chris Amico, the interactive editor for the PBS Online NewsHour, saying: “Humility is healthy. The more we get out of this mind set that we are the sole producers of useful content, the better off we’ll be in the long run.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Links for the weekend | Links para o fim de semana

• Building43

We’ve designed building43 to bring together thought leaders in a variety of disciplines and organizations, from entrepreneurs to those responsible for the latest technologies. They will share knowledge, experiences and advice on how you can use these cool new tools and apps to make your business more successful.

But building43’s foundation and future is its community — people like you who contribute valuable content, through  video, blog posts, podcasts, Friendfeed comments, Tweets or by simply dropping us an email to tell us about the latest or next great thing.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

via ReadWriteWeb

• Why we link: A brief rundown of the reasons your news organization needs to tie the Web together, Ryan Sholin

If you’re a journalist, a huge part of your job is to filter all the information relevant to your community or your beat and pass along the important parts to your readers. Think about all the press releases you get by fax or e-mail, all the phone calls, voicemail, and messages that land on your desk, and think about how you act as a filter for that flood of information. Do the same thing with the Web.

Bring your readers the best links related to your story, and they will thank you. How? By treating you like a first-class citizen of the Internet, and coming back to your news site, which is no longer a dead end backwater in the river of news, but a point of connection where they can find other interesting streams.

• Social journalism: Back to the future, Mindy MacAdams

Engagement — one of three legs needed to support successful social media projects. (The others are inclusion and aggregation.) What does this mean for journalists, for news organizations?

Paul Gillin, a social media consultant and former technology journalist, says journalists have to play “to people’s particular interests” if we hope to engage the public.

• How to bring a startup culture into the newsroom, Journalism2.0

Scott Porad, the CTO of the company behind FailBlog.org and I Can Has Cheezburger?, highlights what hinders innovation at news organizations – and every other big company – in a recent blog post that actually made no mention of the news industry.

Some people view the world with rose-colored glasses. Mine are journo-colored, I guess.

So I immediately identified with Porad’s post, titled Corporate/Startup, and the contrast between working at corporate news organizations (which I did for 15 years) with working at a startup (which I’ve been doing for seven months now).

The discussion centered on the difference between the type of person that chooses to work at corporate jobs vs. those that are drawn to startup companies. Porad concludes that the balance between time spent doing vs. planning is the most significant determining factor. And I completely agree.

• Matt Thompson on adding context and depth to how we report news, NiemanJournalismLab

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Links for today | Links para hoje

• Skills needed by today’s journalists, Mindy MacAdams

Renee Barnes is a radio journalist in Australia; she also teaches online journalism there. In her blog News Frontier, she recently asked readers to rank eight skills, or skill sets, for new journalists:

1. Evidence of blogging and interaction with a wide range of blogs
2. An understanding and active use of social media (Twitter, RSS, social bookmarking etc.)
3. The ability to tell an engaging story using still images and audio (audio slideshow)
4. Ability to shoot, edit and tell stories using video
5. Basic ability to create interactive story elements using Adobe Flash
6. Ability edit audio and produce podcasts
7. Ability to file from the field breaking news
8. Ability to moderate online discussion

Actually, Barnes said “online journalists,” but I think that means ALL journalists.

• 10 steps to saving newspapers in the digital age, CyberJournalist.net

Mark Glaser, Executive editor of PBS MediaShift, sent out 10 great tweets over the weekend, from his hospital bed, about ways to save newspapers. Here they are…

“My 10 step plan for local newspapers to survive and thrive in the digital age (without pay walls)…

1. Do custom small print runs targeted to neighborhoods and interests. Not daily.
2. Become support for local writers, reporters and bloggers; help market them, sell their ads; decentralize operation
3. Replace circ, printing, print production staff with tech, SEO, community managers

• Dear May 2009 Graduate, Here’s 40 Reasons to Still Study Journalism, SocialButterfly

I am completely biased in this post because of my own studies in journalism. That said:

Newspapers are downsizing. Jobs are being cut. The journalism field is in the midst of a re-invention. Despite the landscape and view people may hold when they think of today’s journalism, enrollment in journalism school has INCREASED!

Recently on the Mizzou Mafia’s list serv (we do exist), an alum wrote about her frustration when a prospective freshman asked her about a career in journalism. She just felt like she couldn’t encourage the girl to go into a field that she felt was losing hope.

However, when my High School Senior, Class of 2009 cousin asked me about it the other weekend, I was thrilled. I still encourage perspective students and recent grads to continue in the field of journalism. To provide evidence as to why and to help spread hope in the journalism field, I write this letter:

Dear May 2009 Graduate,

Here are 40 reasons to still study journalism: (…)

• Bullshit about newspapers’ future, dissected, Cory Doctorow

Xark’s Dan Conover, evidently a newspaperman, writes in “The newspaper suicide pact” about the mountain of bullshit that has entered the discussion about the future of newspaper business-models. This is some of the clearest, most interesting, best-referenced criticism of the newspaper industry’s thrash-and-FUD I’ve read:

Newspapers that are turning to paywall plans today are gambling on a risky revenue stream that even the experts aren’t predicting will provide a replacement to their lost advertising revenues (their biggest financial problem is the rapid decline in advertising rates, not the slow decline in print circulation). It’s a “well, we’ve got to do SOMETHING” solution, not a logical, do-the-math solution. And since since most media companies are owned by shareholders, the resulting loss of confidence could be catastrophic.(…)

They don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. And in many cases, they’re literally paid not to get it.

• Decency is the new ad, Jeff Jarvis

So here’s the real punchline: Advertising ends up having nothing to do with media. They become decoupled. Audience no longer yields advertising. Hell, advertising isn’t advertising. It’s relationships. Media only get in the way. There’s the corner we’re painted into, the chaos scenario, perhaps the doomsday scenario for media.

• Get Out of the Printing Business, Moody’s Tells Newspapers, Editor&Publisher

The newspaper industry’s fundamental problem, Moody’s Vice President and Senior Analyst John Puchalla writes in the report, is that is spending far too much on producing and delivering a printed paper than on creating its content and selling the product.

Moody’s calls it a “structural disconnect” with just 14% of cash operating costs, on average, devoted to content creation, while about 70% of costs are devoted to printing, distribution and corporate functions. The remaining 16% of costs are related to advertising sales — another example of devoting too few resources to the principal revenue driver.

“This disconnect is a legacy of the industry’s vertical integration beyond content creation and into the production and distribution of newspapers,” Puchalla said.

The high fixed costs — combined with high debt among many newspaper companies — is squeezing cash flow as revenue declines.

Links for the weekend | Links para o fim de semana

• News Flash From the Future: What Will Journalism Look Like?, FastCompany

With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here’s their answer.

• How the web changed the economics of news – in all media, Paul Bradshaw
  

Listening to news executives talk about micropayments, Kindles, public subsidies, micropayments, collusion, blocking Google and anything else that might save their businesses, it occurs to me that they may have missed some developments in, ah, well, the past ten years. For those and anyone else who is interested, I offer the following primer on how things have changed.

Any attempt to create a viable news operation needs to recognise and take advantage of these changes. I will probably have missed some – I’m hoping you can add them.

• How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live,  Time Magazine

When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you’ll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

• Time says Twitter will change our lives; I Tweeted that I puked, ZDNet

Twitter HQ should be nervous—very nervous. Like “it’s over” nervous. Like “the Tweet bubble is over” nervous. Like “holy crap I need a revenue plan in 27 days” nervous. Like “how is Time going to get younger users on Twitter” nervous (Time’s demo is the polar opposite of young).

And I’m not exaggerating. The Time story is that bad. Ashton was the first hint that Armageddon was near. Now Time seals the deal. Time tells us Twitter will change our lives! Really. It will.

Nevermind that the Time author does little to illustrate how Twitter will change our lives. Great, we talk in 140 characters. We’re using it to communicate in new ways. Sounds like the phone, instant messaging and text messaging. Humans always find new ways to communicate.

• Film School 101, Wire&Lights

As journalists we have a tendency to lay all our cards on the table.  We are trying to inform, and we want to get as much information on the table as quickly as possible.  Most important stuff first, followed by sequentially less important information.  Inverted Pyramid style.  All this information up front makes for pretty boring cinematic storytelling.  Why bother watching the entire story if the you get the gist of it in the first few seconds.

Check out this video from the academy-award winning director of “Born into Brothels.”  In the beginning, you know very little about what story is unfolding.  Only an intriguing title to guide you, but bit by bit the director reveals more information to help complete the picture, always leaving a reason to keep watching up until the final seconds.

Links for today | Links para hoje

• The ‘hyperinterest’ approach to online news, Save the Media

Imagine a news Web site that’s a portal to everything people used to read in newspapers plus a bunch of things that newspapers were never able to provide. A cool idea, I think, but first it requires newspapers to embrace two provocative ideas:

1. The mass audience is dead.
2. The product of newspaper Web sites is not news.

• Selling online news content like airline seats: price discrimination maximizes revenue, Nieman Journalism Lab

As Sun points out (15), right now the model lacks quantification — we don’t know the shape of the curve, or the scales of the axes, so this needs further research. He suggests a hypothetical way to set up payment tiers for various content packages (16).

If we look around in the real world of news publishing, we can find the beginnings of such a pricing strategy emerging, and perhaps this points to the possibility of a real-world application of Sun’s suggestion.  To examine this, I think it’s necessary to look at the entire spectrum of content publishing from print to online to mobile, as a single demand curve.

Near the high (left) end of the curve, certainly, there will be print.  Paul Gillin at Newspaper Death Watch comments on the recent print price increases by various publishers as representing a “sunsetting strategy” for their print products — milking them for whatever they may still be worth, and “winnowing out their low value customers.”  This may be true in the long run, but it’s also possible to see it as part of a shift toward print becoming a high-cost niche tier in the pricing scheme.  When a news organization decides to become a digital enterprise, that’s exactly how they should be viewing print.  The Times, at something close to $900 per year for a year of single copies, or $550 home-delivered (within the New York metro area), is certainly targeting the high-end readership niche with its pricing, but most other papers are still trying to hang on to market penetration in print with much lower pricing.

• Ten Songs About Print Journalism, Paste Magazine (via Music for Media)

Once upon a time, being a newspaperman (or woman) was something to stand up and shout about. Journalism was a noble occupation. Reporters and critics worked for peanuts but fought the good fight. The public loved us, believed us, hung on to every word of our investigative stories and critical analyses. We were in the trenches, dodging threats and insults from criminals, corrupt politicians (and cranky rock stars), ferreting out Truth for the sake of Justice and the American Way.

That was a long time ago.

• ¿Es transparente el mercado laboral periodístico?, Lola como Mola

Hace unos meses leía, sin que me sonara extraño, en un post de Borja Ventura, el caso de un joven periodista que relataba su amarga experiencia en la búsqueda de trabajo. De su testimonio se podía intuir la falta de transparencia de muchos procesos de selección del mundo periodístico.

Personalmente siempre me he preguntado por qué tan pocas ofertas de trabajo para medios de comunicación son públicas, cuesta ver anuncios diciendo “Se busca periodista para medio de comunicación…”.

• Four observations about charging for news that are often overlooked, Nieman Journalism Lab

4. Even if pay walls are the future of newspapers, they aren’t the future of news. Newspapers face a very specific financial situation that’s driving their choice to charge for content or not. These companies are giant ships with dim prospects for quickly turning around in this economic tempest, so naturally they will turn to stopgap measures. It would be a mistake to read much more into it than that.

• Three ways to become a good Documentary Journalist, Kurt Lancaster

Check out Jigar Mehta’s documentary journalism piece, The Recession-Proof Artist at The New York Times. It reveals another example of how simplicity lends itself to a visually-powerful work when the a video journalist avoids the broadcast news style:

It’s not breaking-news, a political analysis, nor a unraveling of a crisis, but there are three reasons why I think this is a strong piece, reflecting three elements of strong documentary journalism: (…)

• Yet another anti-Twitter piece written in ignorance, Transforming the Gaz

It’s OK to be sick and tired of Twitter rants by journalists who don’t understand it.

The same day I posted about Edward Wasserman writing about Twitter without really learning about it, I read another piece from another journalist I respect, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, writing The Twitter Explosion in the American Journalism Review.

Farhi, to his credit, did a fairly thorough job of researching Twitter by reading about it online and by interviewing journalists who use it. He just didn’t bother, from what I can tell, to learn anything firsthand by actually using it. And his writing revealed his ignorance.

• Google Wave and news, Jeff Jarvis

Never underestimate Google. That should have been my 41st WWGD? rule. Just as I was thinking they were behind the curve on the live web – and argued they should buy Twitter – Google attacked it from the left flank with Wave.

In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.

Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.

Links for the weekend | Links para o fim de semana

• What happens when you take away the money question?, Joanna Geary

So what if you took away the money question. What questions would we be asking about local newspapers? Perhaps we’d be asking: What are they for? Who do they serve? What should they contain? Why do we produce them in the way we do?

Perhaps its spending time answering these that gets us closer to answering “How do we make money?”.

This struck me whilst watch Jane McGonigal’s Webstock presentation that asks “Why doesn’t the real world work like a game?”.

The slide above particularly grabbed my attention. These are the main elements that make people happy, Jane says.

• Adrian Holovaty: Is data journalism? The answer, Journalism.co.uk

“1. Who cares?

2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.”

• For Wired, a Revival Lacks Ads, NYTimes

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, believes in logic the way Tina Brown believes in buzz. He rarely approves a story idea unless the writer backs up the thesis with data. The basis of his best-selling book “The Long Tail” was a statistical phenomenon called the Pareto distribution; in his coming book, “Free,” he expresses arguments in profit-loss charts. The walls in his San Francisco office are whiteboards, covered with scrawled formulas.

“Everything I do is expressed in equations,” he said, looking at his work.

But Mr. Anderson has yet to solve the equation for Wired. Under his editorship, the magazine is an editorial success, winning three National Magazine Awards last month, which tied it for the most honored magazine. And Mr. Anderson’s own profile is higher than ever, thanks to his books, which roll messy business trends into neat canapés that executives pass around. He gives 50 speeches a year for an estimated $35,000 to $50,000 apiece.

• JournalistTweets: Follow Journalists on Twitter, RaceTalkBlog

This beta service delivers tweets from thousands of media sources in North America and the UK, organized by topic or region. It is also fully searchable by content and journalist name to quickly identify key influencers and issues. In addition, a “Top Tweeters” link displays tweets from frequent tweeters at media outlets.

• The journalism bubble, Jeff Jarvis

When I decided to go into the news business, we took a vow of poverty, or at least acknowledged that we’d never be rich. I chose not to go to law school and instead transferred to j-school and did so in the full awareness that I’d never be well-paid.

Wrong. I ended up being very well-paid because I worked in news in the last gasp of its century-longer monopoly bubble, which ironically came to a climax at the same time as the short-lived tech bubble. Before 2001, metro newspapers still made tens of millions of dollars in each of the classifieds categories, plus retail, plus circulation revenue. Magazines were still blockbuster businesses worth risking tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars to launch. TV will still a star medium where so-called talent was worth big money.

• Chartle.net Creates Venn Diagrams, Interactive Maps, and More, Lifehacker