Flacks vastly outnumber hacks these days

Reporters were shocked, shocked to hear that a big PR agency, had tried to persuade newspaper writers and a blogger to scribble nasty things about Google’s record on privacy, while concealing that its growing rival, Facebook, was paying for this lobbying.

The incident shows how the upheaval in the news business is working for, and against, the PR firms. Newspapers and other old media are losing influence—and thus becoming less worth lobbying. But job cuts and online obligations mean journalists are also more desperate for copy, making them a softer touch. Research by Jamil Jonna of the University of Oregon (originally for a book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism”, but since updated) found that as newsrooms have been slimmed and PR agencies have grown fatter, for each American journalist there are now, on average, six flacks hassling him to run crummy stories

Read more at The Economist.

The Rise of Infographics

Brands are also making serious investments in infographics and data visualization as a part of their marketing and communications strategy. At the nexus of journalism, analysis and design, infographics are undoubtedly relevant.

Shane Snow, Visual.ly: "Visualization is a great storytelling medium and is also strong in driving digital traffic. The wonderful thing is that there are a million ways to tell a story with visualizations."



Read more here

'Real world' apps get new meaning

That virtual yellow first-down line superimposed on an actual football field is one of the more visible examples of a technology that is still not well known. But augmented reality is quickly emerging from obscurity and could soon dramatically reshape how we shop, learn, play and discover what is around us.

In simple terms, augmented reality is a visual layer of information — tied to your location — that appears on top of whatever reality you're seeing.

Imagine:

•Pointing your phone at a famous landmark and almost instantly receiving relevant historic or current information about your surroundings.

•Fixing a paper jam in a copy machine by pointing a device at the copier and, directed by the virtual arrows that appear, pressing in sequence the right buttons and levers.

•Visualizing what you'll look like in a wedding dress without trying it on.

Read more at USA Today

How Drudge Has Stayed on Top

The Drudge Report is now more powerful in driving news than the half-billion folks on Facebook. With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-’90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country. With stable traffic of about 12 million to 14 million unique visitors every month no matter what kind of news is breaking and in the last 14 years, there have been no big redesigns, no big rollout of new features and no staffing up to provide original content. The initial site, designed to load quickly in the age of dial-up modems, remains relatively untouched.

“The genius of Drudge is the simplicity of the layout,” said Matt Labash, a writer for The Weekly Standard. “Everyone else who tries to knock him off complicates that. There’s no tabs. There’s no jumps. There’s hardly any clutter.."Andrew Breitbart, the founder of several conservative Web sites said “He does not rig search optimization, he does not care about the next big Web innovation, he just has the best nose for news there is."

Read more at the New York Times

TiVo's Slo-Mo Trip Toward Profitability

Despite its strong brand recognition, TiVo has struggled to turn a profit. The deficit was nothing new: In 10 of the past 11 years, the Alviso (Calif.)-based company has racked up losses. TiVo's customer base has dwindled, from a high of 4.4 million users in 2007 to just over 2 million in January 2011. Part of the problem is that while lots of people say they TiVo their favorite TV shows, in reality, many use the cheaper digital video recorders (DVR) provided by their cable or satellite operator. "

Read more at Business Week

TV: Is it still ‘a vast wasteland’?

Fifty years ago this week, Newton Minow delivered one of the “most electrifying speeches ever given by a bureaucrat,” said Aaron Barnhart in The Kansas City Star. The newly named head of the Federal Communications Commission boldly told a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters that the television shows they’d produced were “vast wasteland”. The medium has certainly evolved since 1961, but is it any better?

Yes, it is, said Newton Minow in the Chicago Tribune. There’s still plenty of junk on TV, but the medium is now “far vaster than we could have imagined in 1961,” and much of what’s now available has “far exceeded my most ambitious dreams.”

Read more at The Week