The San Francisco Bay Area’s new growth industry: the non-profit news organization. In the new model, nonprofit news organizations sell their stories to multiple partners — newspapers, radio and television stations, blogs, and hyper local news sites — rather than to just one news organization. In a significant shift, traditional media outlets that once would have been phobic about printing and article that was not produced by their own staff writers are now running pieces executed by these third-party vendors.
Instead of relying on advertising for revenue, the old-fashioned way, these groups raise funds from foundations, businesses and individuals. In addition, they sell the journalism they produce.
The Bay Citizen, which is underwritten by a $5 million grant from Warren Hellman, a local businessman and philanthropist — and which is currently gearing up for it debut — will provide coverage of the area primarily available on its own website and also in the local pages of The New York Times. San Francisco Public Press, which started a year ago and soon plans to put out a newspaper. Spot.Us, a site that raises funds for journalists to do specific stories.
Read more at the New York Times.
Saturday, April 10
Tweets Gone Without a Trace
A new iPhone app called TigerText could be a godsend in oppressive regimes, in which activists' phones are often seized or their phone histories examined. -phone application that allows its users to exchange text messages that disappear after a set period from one minute to five days. It's gone from the sender's phone, the receiver's phone and any and all computer servers. It cannot be forwarded or stored it. It was reportedly downloaded 100,000 times in the first week. At the height of the Tiger Woods media frenzy, it was the third most popular utility app on the iTunes website.
Does it threaten national security? Retired major general Dale Meyerrose, a former CIO for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and now the head of cybersecurity at tech firm Harris Corp says, "Extremists and terrorists are very tech savvy," he says. "This is not a game changer. It just might make divorce lawyers' jobs harder."
Read more at Time Magazine.
Does it threaten national security? Retired major general Dale Meyerrose, a former CIO for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and now the head of cybersecurity at tech firm Harris Corp says, "Extremists and terrorists are very tech savvy," he says. "This is not a game changer. It just might make divorce lawyers' jobs harder."
Read more at Time Magazine.
Citizen Journalism Setting Up News Desks
A citizen journalism site called AllVoices says it will add "global news desks" in 30 different cities around the world. Both professional and citizen journalists will provide regular in-country reports through these news desks. Cities include London, Nairobi,Baghdad, Beijing, Islamabad, and Shanghai. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phones. AllVoices was recently given $3 million in funding and claims a community of 300,000 citizen reporters and 5 million unique visitors per month. The site creators say they will soon expand coverage in the US.
Read more at Tech Crunch.
Read more at Tech Crunch.
Apple Opens Mobile Ad Service
Apple is adding its own advertising system to the next version of software that will power its iPhone, iPad and other mobile gadgets. iAd will allow developers of the programs available in Apple's App Store—many of which are free or cost 99 cents—to include ads in their software. Apple will sell the ads, with developers who create the apps getting 60% of the revenue of any mobile ads, and Apple taking the remainder. The debut of iAd is likely to pose a challenge to existing companies that serve up ads in mobile devices, such as AdMob Inc., which Google announced it would acquire last year for $750 million.
Overall, the mobile ad market remains small. Marketers have been slower to buy mobile ads than expected, largely because consumers aren't visiting mobile Web sites in meaningful numbers and the process of creating mobile ad campaigns is technically and logistically challenging. U.S. advertisers only spent $416 million on mobile ads last year—a fraction of the $22.4 billion U.S. online advertising market.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
Overall, the mobile ad market remains small. Marketers have been slower to buy mobile ads than expected, largely because consumers aren't visiting mobile Web sites in meaningful numbers and the process of creating mobile ad campaigns is technically and logistically challenging. U.S. advertisers only spent $416 million on mobile ads last year—a fraction of the $22.4 billion U.S. online advertising market.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
Wednesday, April 7
Is This the Future of Journalism?
A new media organization could upend the sacred cows of traditional journalism. Wikileaks, an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit, released a video showing an American Apache helicopter open fire on a group of men, killing two Reuters employees, along with 10 other people, on July 12, 2007. No traditional journalism organization was able to bring it to the public, as these tapes are normally classified; Reuters filed an FOIA request but never received a response.
The organization was launched in December 2006. Funded by private donors, it does not accept government or corporate funding, encourages would-be whistleblowers to upload incriminating material anonymously on its website. The small editorial staff verifies submitted documents, decrypts or translates them when necessary, and then publishes them in full -- often with commentary.
It prints no paper, but instead stores its articles online in Sweden, where journalists are required by law not to reveal sources. Its domain name, wikileaks.org, is registered in California, where the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation intervened when an aggrieved Swiss bank tried shut the site down.
Wikileaks' editors released the evidence of toxic waste dumping, posted the so-called "climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009, leaked the confidential creditor list of a collapsed Icelandic bank, Australia's secret blacklist of censored URLs, and more than 500,000 pager messages from New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Despite these public-interest successes, Wikileaks' disregard for gag orders and their unabashed advocacy makes full-throated praise for the organization rare. Some are skeptical of using Wikileaks as a blueprint for a new, hard-hitting form of journalism. Yet no journalist I've spoken to will speak ill of Wikileaks in private: Every reporter understands that Wikileaks is the thin end of the wedge. If they can't run a dangerous story, no one can.
Read more here.
The organization was launched in December 2006. Funded by private donors, it does not accept government or corporate funding, encourages would-be whistleblowers to upload incriminating material anonymously on its website. The small editorial staff verifies submitted documents, decrypts or translates them when necessary, and then publishes them in full -- often with commentary.
It prints no paper, but instead stores its articles online in Sweden, where journalists are required by law not to reveal sources. Its domain name, wikileaks.org, is registered in California, where the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation intervened when an aggrieved Swiss bank tried shut the site down.
Wikileaks' editors released the evidence of toxic waste dumping, posted the so-called "climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009, leaked the confidential creditor list of a collapsed Icelandic bank, Australia's secret blacklist of censored URLs, and more than 500,000 pager messages from New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Despite these public-interest successes, Wikileaks' disregard for gag orders and their unabashed advocacy makes full-throated praise for the organization rare. Some are skeptical of using Wikileaks as a blueprint for a new, hard-hitting form of journalism. Yet no journalist I've spoken to will speak ill of Wikileaks in private: Every reporter understands that Wikileaks is the thin end of the wedge. If they can't run a dangerous story, no one can.
Read more here.
Monday, April 5
Broadcast news shifts focus to Internet, mobile devices to stay profitable
Television stations are making less money from broadcast advertising, but are working to make up the difference by delivering news through new technology such as online and mobile devices.
"In the '90s, I was a broadcaster. I don't consider myself a broadcaster anymore," said Perry Kidder, president and general manager of WFRV, Channel 5, in Green Bay. "We are local content creators."
Average television advertising rates have been down 20 to 30 percent, and can be negotiated lower based on circumstances. They are beginning to increase again as the economy shows early signs of recovery.
Read more here.
"In the '90s, I was a broadcaster. I don't consider myself a broadcaster anymore," said Perry Kidder, president and general manager of WFRV, Channel 5, in Green Bay. "We are local content creators."
Average television advertising rates have been down 20 to 30 percent, and can be negotiated lower based on circumstances. They are beginning to increase again as the economy shows early signs of recovery.
Read more here.
Twitter Predicts Movie Box-Office Sales
Twitter can predict, with astonishing accuracy, how well a movie will sell, according toResearchers at HP Labs.
By monitoring movie mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users over three months, they found the rate of tweets around the release date and the number of theaters its released in was 97.3% accurate in predicting opening weekend box office. By contrast, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which has been the gold standard for opening box-office predictions, had a 96.5% accuracy. By looking at the ratio of positive tweets to negative ones they predicted second-weekend performance with a 94% accuracy rate.
Twitter might be more than just a mirror of mass sentiment--the service might also influence it. In other words, could you actually make a product launch far more successful with a really smart Twitter strategy?
Read more at Fast Company.
By monitoring movie mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users over three months, they found the rate of tweets around the release date and the number of theaters its released in was 97.3% accurate in predicting opening weekend box office. By contrast, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which has been the gold standard for opening box-office predictions, had a 96.5% accuracy. By looking at the ratio of positive tweets to negative ones they predicted second-weekend performance with a 94% accuracy rate.
Twitter might be more than just a mirror of mass sentiment--the service might also influence it. In other words, could you actually make a product launch far more successful with a really smart Twitter strategy?
Read more at Fast Company.
E-Mail Named Tops for 'Targeting'
A survey of executives at Fortune 500 companies, publishing companies, media agencies and ad agencies finds e-mail and search regarded as the digital channels that worked best last year. The Datran Media survey asked respondents to identify the digital channels that "performed the strongest for your company in 2009."
E-mail got the most mentions (cited by 39 percent), followed by search (24 percent), offline (9 percent), affiliate marketing (9 percent), display (7 percent), direct mail (6 percent), social media (5 percent) and mobile (1 percent).
67 percent of respondents said they'll be "leveraging online video this year." As for social media, opinion was mixed on the question of whether it will "generate quantifiable results in 2010."
Read more at Media Post.
E-mail got the most mentions (cited by 39 percent), followed by search (24 percent), offline (9 percent), affiliate marketing (9 percent), display (7 percent), direct mail (6 percent), social media (5 percent) and mobile (1 percent).
67 percent of respondents said they'll be "leveraging online video this year." As for social media, opinion was mixed on the question of whether it will "generate quantifiable results in 2010."
Read more at Media Post.
Sunday, April 4
Copyediting Weak in Online Mags
The Columbia Journalism Review undertook the first survey of the relationship between magazines and their websites last year. About half of the respondents said that copy-editing standards for their websites were looser than for their print editions. An additional 11% said that online content wasn't copy-edited at all. The numbers for fact checking were even more troubling: 40% said that web standards were looser than print, and 17% said that they did no fact checking whatsoever online. And a little more than half of the respondents said they correct factual errors on their websites without notifying readers of the errors.
This raises the question: Is online content held to the same standards as its print equivalents? Given the prevailing business model, in which advertising is the principal revenue source for the vast majority of magazine websites, our answer is no.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.
This raises the question: Is online content held to the same standards as its print equivalents? Given the prevailing business model, in which advertising is the principal revenue source for the vast majority of magazine websites, our answer is no.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.
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