So What if Tons of People Read That 'Snow Fall' Story on the Times Website?

Maybe that New York Times multimedia beauty of a story, "Snow Fall," should be the future of long-form journalism after all — because it sure did bring in a lot of readers. Whether it was enough to merit the effort, though, remains to be seen. John Branch's avalanche narrative and its fancy design have racked up over 3.5 million page views in one week.

The Times, of course, does long, reported features all the time, but as The Atlantic's Derek Thompson pointed out, "There is no feasible way to make six-month sixteen-person multimedia projects the day-to-day future of journalism, nor is there a need to."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire

News, Politics Dominated Social Media TV

The biggest single-day social media activity came from the presidential election this November -- with some 17.4 million social media interactions. Researcher General Sentiment looked at all social activity from social platforms, as well as news channels. This was followed by Hurricane Sandy (9.4 million), the battle over anti-piracy legislation (8.7 million), and the second presidential debate (7.6 million) and the vice presidential debate (6.87 million).

The biggest entertainment event of the year -- in terms of single-day social media activity -- was CBS' "Grammy Awards," which posted 6.8 million in social media. After this came NBC's Summer London Olympics.

Read more at Media Post

E-book readership rises sharply

The number of Americans reading electronic books rose sharply over the last year while the population of printed book readers slightly declined, according to a survey. The trend highlights the massive popularity of e-readers and tablets that have flooded homes and schools in the past year. About 33 percent of Americans 16 and older now own an e-reading device such as a Kindle or iPad, up from 18 percent last year, according to Pew Research. Read more at the Washington Post

In 2013 the internet will become a mostly mobile medium

The year 2002 was a turning-point for the telephone, invented 126 years earlier. For the first time, the number of mobile phones overtook the number of fixed-line ones, making the telephone a predominantly mobile technology. During 2013 the same thing will happen to the internet, just 44 years after its ancestor, ARPANET, was first switched on. The number of internet-connected mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, will exceed the number of desktop and laptop personal computers (PCs) in use, according to figures from Morgan Stanley.

That does not mean that mobile devices will displace PCs altogether. The rise of mobile phones, after all, did not mean that fixed-line phones stopped working, even if their number is now in decline. The centre of gravity of the internet will have shifted.

Read more at The Economist

in 2013: Wearable computers

Sometime in the first few months of 2013, people wearing strange-looking glasses will start to roam America’s streets. Project Glass, the brainchild of Google, looks like a rather bizarre pair of glasses, but is in fact a mini display screen mounted in a flexible frame that also incorporates a camera, a microphone and a computer.

This gizmo, which lets users see e-mails and other stuff on its screen and take photos and record videos using its camera, is the most ambitious initiative to date in the emerging field of wearable computing.

Read more at The Economist

New York Times gets into original ebook business with Byliner

The New York Times wants to capture a bit more of that creativity by producing timely ebooks with the publishing startup Byliner. The deal means the Times will publish around a dozen nonfiction narratives in 2013. A number of newspapers use ebooks as a means for repurposing and repackaging their reporting for a different audience. But Gerald Marzorati, the Times’ editor for editorial development, said the Times will go beyond rehashing its reporting in ebook form and plans to develop original stories that will be exclusive to the platform. Most Byliner originals (are) stories that fall somewhere between a long magazine article and a short book... Amazon has said it sold more than 2 million Kindle Singles in the program’s first 14 months.

Read more at the Nieman Journalism Lab

Local news gets automated

One thing that’s clear is that local journalism, when produced by full-time, professional journalists, is expensive — possibly too expensive to justify the revenues for many kinds of stories. Just ask AOL’s Patch, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its 850-plus local news sites around the country, so far achieving only modest returns.

Read more at the Nieman Journalism Lab

The year responsive design starts to get weird

Over the past year, the idea of responsive web design has taken hold in a growing number of newsrooms...more things in our lives are going to become connected to the internet, capable of displaying news for us when we find ourselves with a moment. And many of those things are going to have bigger, better screens than our tiny smartphones do now. So if I can start a great, long-form story on my coffee table, send it to my bathroom mirror as I brush my teeth before going to bed, and finish it on my iPad before falling asleep, why wouldn’t I?

Read more here

The Scariest Thing About the Newspaper Business Isn't Print's Decline

Google made more than $20 billion in ad revenue this year, more than all U.S. print media combined. In 2006, magazines and newspapers sold $60 billion more in ads than Google did.

Read more here