The state Supreme Court agreed in November to hear arguments on Stephen Glass’s moral fitness to become a member of the State Bar of California. He gained worldwide notoriety in 1998 after dozens of stories he wrote while working as a Washington journalist in the mid-to-late 1990s were discovered to be fabricated. These pieces described incidents that never took place and attributed quotations to made-up people. The scam ended in May 1998 after reporting and inquires from Forbes Digital Tool editor Adam L. Penenberg tipped the New Republic off about the fishiness of Glass’s piece about “Jukt Micronics,” and all of his journalistic work was scrutinized for lies. Depending on how you read them, the documents reveal a fully reformed Glass, or the same old Stephen, cutting corners and conning people as he did in the old days.
Read more here.
Saturday, December 10
Work: Life without email
Is email obsolete? asked Steven Rosenbaum in FastCompany.com. Atos, Europe’s largest IT firm, thinks so. The company last week announced that it was banning internal email, as CEO Thierry Breton thinks that 90 percent of messages sent between employees are a waste of time. Instead, Breton wants his 74,000 staff members to talk to one another in person or on the phone, and switch to “real time” messaging tools like Facebook. It looks as if other companies will soon follow suit. By 2014, a technology research group has predicted, social networking will replace email as the main method of communication for 20 percent of businesses.
The younger generation has all but given up on it—visits to email sites by 12- to 17-year-olds fell 18 percent in 2010—and digitally savvy teens now communicate “almost entirely via social networks and instant-messenger services.
Read more at The Week
The younger generation has all but given up on it—visits to email sites by 12- to 17-year-olds fell 18 percent in 2010—and digitally savvy teens now communicate “almost entirely via social networks and instant-messenger services.
Read more at The Week
New Twitter formalizes news wire service function
As part of a major redesign, Twitter is launching a new “discover” section — a personalized stream of news stories and other information “based on your current location, what you follow and what’s happening in the world.”
In other words, it’s acting like a news service. Raw information meets (automated) editorial judgment, and out comes a digital front page of headlines, photos, videos or hashtags it thinks a user will be interested in.
Twitter took some baby steps this way by featuring related top stories in search results. But this is a big leap, and has positive implications for news publishers hoping to reach audiences through Twitter.
While some news organizations embrace the intangible benefits of engagement and interactivity, most are on Twitter primarily to drive traffic to their stories. The discover section promises to do that more effectively, as people who might have missed the specific tweets in their stream about a news story will still see it showcased in the discover section.
Journalists love Storify, for good reason, to tell a story using tweets and other social media. But sometimes you just want to embed one or two tweets in a story, and the new Twitter (finally) supports that.
Read more here
In other words, it’s acting like a news service. Raw information meets (automated) editorial judgment, and out comes a digital front page of headlines, photos, videos or hashtags it thinks a user will be interested in.
Twitter took some baby steps this way by featuring related top stories in search results. But this is a big leap, and has positive implications for news publishers hoping to reach audiences through Twitter.
While some news organizations embrace the intangible benefits of engagement and interactivity, most are on Twitter primarily to drive traffic to their stories. The discover section promises to do that more effectively, as people who might have missed the specific tweets in their stream about a news story will still see it showcased in the discover section.
Journalists love Storify, for good reason, to tell a story using tweets and other social media. But sometimes you just want to embed one or two tweets in a story, and the new Twitter (finally) supports that.
Read more here
Monday, December 5
Drone journalism?
This January, the FAA will be proposing new rules on the use of drones in American airspace — a possibility some see as positively Orwellian, but others, including some journalists, see as an opportunity.
For journalism professor Matt Waite, the time is ripe to study how drones will affect his industry. This November, he started the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to study the legality, ethicality and practicality of drones in journalism. The lab’s site describes drones as “an ideal platform for journalism.”
For shrinking newsrooms staffs, drones that cost around $40,000 sound a bit more budget-friendly than helicopters that cost in the millions. Drones could also provide much better coverage of natural disasters, such as the widespread fires in Texas, or in a nuclear disaster such as the Fukushima-Daachii plant. Drones could also be put to use in media blackout zones, such as during the Occupy Wall Street eviction, when journalists were barred from Zuccotti Park out of safety concerns.
With the possibilities, also come concerns. The technology raises major privacy flags. In a world post-phone-hacking scandal, the technology could easily be taken advantage of by celebrity trackers. It could also mean journalists could be kept under survelliance as well.
Read more at the Washington Post
For journalism professor Matt Waite, the time is ripe to study how drones will affect his industry. This November, he started the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to study the legality, ethicality and practicality of drones in journalism. The lab’s site describes drones as “an ideal platform for journalism.”
For shrinking newsrooms staffs, drones that cost around $40,000 sound a bit more budget-friendly than helicopters that cost in the millions. Drones could also provide much better coverage of natural disasters, such as the widespread fires in Texas, or in a nuclear disaster such as the Fukushima-Daachii plant. Drones could also be put to use in media blackout zones, such as during the Occupy Wall Street eviction, when journalists were barred from Zuccotti Park out of safety concerns.
With the possibilities, also come concerns. The technology raises major privacy flags. In a world post-phone-hacking scandal, the technology could easily be taken advantage of by celebrity trackers. It could also mean journalists could be kept under survelliance as well.
Read more at the Washington Post
Syria Bans iPhones to Prevent Citizen Journalism
Syria has banned the iPhone, reports say, as the government tries to control information getting out of the country. In a statement apparently issued by the customs department of the Syrian finance ministry and seen by Lebanese and German media, the authorities "warn anyone against using the iPhone in Syria".
The UN believes 4,000 people have been killed in Syria since March. Most international media have been banned from Syria since the uprising began, so footage of the violent crackdown has primarily come from activists filming material themselves and posting it on the internet.
Read more at the BBC
The UN believes 4,000 people have been killed in Syria since March. Most international media have been banned from Syria since the uprising began, so footage of the violent crackdown has primarily come from activists filming material themselves and posting it on the internet.
Read more at the BBC
Forecasts for 2012 Ad Spending Revised Downward
Ad spending is expected to see single-digital growth next year. However, two firms--Publicis Groupe's ZenithOptimedia and WPP's Group M--are now getting more conservative in their predictions about the business in 2012.
The latest forecast by ZenithOptimedia shows that global ad spending in major media will grow 4.7% to $486 billion in 2012, 5.2% in 2013 and 5.8% in 2014. That's a dip from what it said in October.
Separately, Group M says it expects a 6.4% increase in global ad spending in 2012, which is down from a July report forecasting a 6.8% increase. Its new report predicts that 2011 will show a 5% increase in spending over 2010, to $490 billion.
One of the most striking statistics in ZenithOptimedia's report was this one: over the next three years, nearly half (48%) of all the world's growth in ad expenditure will come from just ten emerging markets.
Read more here
The latest forecast by ZenithOptimedia shows that global ad spending in major media will grow 4.7% to $486 billion in 2012, 5.2% in 2013 and 5.8% in 2014. That's a dip from what it said in October.
Separately, Group M says it expects a 6.4% increase in global ad spending in 2012, which is down from a July report forecasting a 6.8% increase. Its new report predicts that 2011 will show a 5% increase in spending over 2010, to $490 billion.
One of the most striking statistics in ZenithOptimedia's report was this one: over the next three years, nearly half (48%) of all the world's growth in ad expenditure will come from just ten emerging markets.
Read more here
Two Giant Radio Groups Form Daily-Deal Alliance
Two of the fastest-growing trends in media have been daily-deal Web sites and the aggregation of entertainment content online. Now the two biggest radio companies have formed an alliance to compete on both fronts.
Read more at the New York Times
Read more at the New York Times
10 Historical Events Affected by Social Media
Today we turn to social media when an influential event occurs as a way to share our personal experiences and relate to the people most affected. It provides us with the reassurance that we’re not alone, but also gives us the opportunity to help.
Here are 10 moments in history affected by social media. How would social media have changed the outcome of other historical events?
Read more here
Here are 10 moments in history affected by social media. How would social media have changed the outcome of other historical events?
Read more here
Newspaper Revs Dive In Q3
There has been no relief for the newspaper business in the second half of this year, judging by the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America, which have total ad revenues declining 8.9% from $6.1 billion in the third quarter of 2010 to $5.56 billion in the third quarter of 2011. The overall percentage decline in the third quarter was actually larger than in the two previous quarters, dashing hopes that the rate of decline might at least be slowing. This marks the 21st straight quarter of consecutive year-over-year ad revenue declines for the newspaper business.
Read more here
Read more here
Sunday, December 4
the Future of Printed Books
Back in the ’80s, the rise of word processors and email convinced a lot of people that paper would vanish. Why print anything when you could simply squirt documents around electronically? We all know how that turned out. Paper use exploded; indeed, firms that adopted email used 40 percent more paper. That’s because even in a world of screens, paper offers unique ways to organize and share your thoughts, as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper noted in The Myth of the Paperless Office. There’s also this technology truism to consider: When you make something easier to do, people do more of it.
“Print-on-demand” publishing is about to do the same thing to books. In a precise parallel to the office-printing boom, print-on-demand is creating an odd new phenomenon that Blurb founder Eileen Gittens calls social publishing. In traditional print publishing, the number of new titles increased by 5 percent from 2009 to 2010, rising to 316,000. In contrast, print-on-demand and self-publishing boomed by 169 percent—hitting a stunning 2.8 million unique titles. Granted, few of those titles have been printed more than a handful of times; print-on-demand is still a small fraction of total book production. But the trend is obvious.
Read more here
“Print-on-demand” publishing is about to do the same thing to books. In a precise parallel to the office-printing boom, print-on-demand is creating an odd new phenomenon that Blurb founder Eileen Gittens calls social publishing. In traditional print publishing, the number of new titles increased by 5 percent from 2009 to 2010, rising to 316,000. In contrast, print-on-demand and self-publishing boomed by 169 percent—hitting a stunning 2.8 million unique titles. Granted, few of those titles have been printed more than a handful of times; print-on-demand is still a small fraction of total book production. But the trend is obvious.
Read more here
Why Kids Can’t Search
We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan (found) students generally rely on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list. But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.
Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching.
Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less. A good education is the true key to effective search.
Read more at Wired
Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching.
Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less. A good education is the true key to effective search.
Read more at Wired
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