Saturday, July 2

Gannett Shutters Hyper-Local NJ Sites

After much talk about the future of news relying more on user-generated contributions, Gannett's early experiments in crowd-sourced local news content has fizzled. It shuttered the company's 17 "hyperlocal" news sites in New Jersey, which operated under the umbrella InJersey.com site. The local news sites were scuttled by layoffs among Gannett staffers, who were still contributing the lion's share of the content.

User-generated content rarely exceeded 10%.

Read more here

Wednesday, June 29

Twitter For Newsrooms!? Twitter *Is* A Newsroom

Earlier this morning Twitter released “Twitter for Newsrooms,” its primer on how to use Twitter to gather and report news in the 21st century. #TfN is Twitter’s official nudge to old school reporters, a heavy handed reminder to get with the program and embrace Twitter as media production and consumption device.

“Twitter for Newsrooms is a bit redundant for me because Twitter is my newsroom,” says Mediagazer founding editor Megan McCarthy. Indeed, I’ve heard many journalists compare watching the news cycle on Twitter to being in a physical newsroom when breaking news would come in on the wire.

Read more at Tech Crunch

Tuesday, June 28

Cassettes Return for an Encore

It looked like the end of the reel for cassettes. The last car to ship with a tape deck was the 2010 Lexus SC 430. Sony stopped making the Walkman last October. This can mean only one thing: Cassettes are about to be cool again.

Read more at Wired

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time. Until now, no company has made it so easy to hack into a product as popular as the Kinect, the fastest-selling consumer-tech product of all time. The Kinect racked up 10 million sales in just four months.

Read more at Wired

Monday, June 27

High Court Strikes Down California Videogame Law

The Supreme Court struck down Monday a California law blocking minors from buying violent videogames, voting 7-2 that it violates the First Amendment. It was the latest ruling by the high court to take a broad view of free-speech rights.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Rises

Americans' confidence in newspapers and television news rebounded slightly in the past year, having been stuck at record lows since 2007 (according to a new Gallup poll). The 28% of Americans who express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and the 27% who say the same about television news still lag significantly behind the levels of trust seen through much of the 1990s and into 2003. Interestingly, considering the highly polarized nature of cable news, all ideological groups increased their trust in television news to about the same degree.

Read more here

Sunday, June 26

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

At its December 2008 peak, Myspace attracted 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). By May of this year that number had dropped to 34.8 million. Over the past two years, Myspace has lost, on average, more than a million U.S. users a month. Because Myspace makes nearly all its money from advertising, the exodus has a direct correlation to its revenue. In 2009 the site brought in $470 million in advertising dollars, according to EMarketer. In 2011, it's projected to generate $184 million.

Read more at Business Week