E-Books Finally Get Traction in Japan

The Japanese are avid readers; the country’s publishing industry generated $22.5 billion in revenue last year, according to the Japan Book Publishers Association. A decade ago, long before the Kindle revolutionized the publishing world in the U.S., Japanese authors were writing novels using text messaging and readers were catching up on their favorite novels and manga comics on their mobile phones.

“People don’t want to buy the machines because there’s not very much content, and publishers aren’t keen to invest in the content because there aren’t many e-readers,” says Hamish Macaskill, managing director of English Agency Japan, a Tokyo literary agency.

Finally, though, Japan’s e-reader dark ages may be ending. EPUB 3.0, the latest open-standard software for digital readers developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, an electronic publishing trade group, can display Japanese text vertically. That’s unlocked the door for some newcomers to the e-reader market, allowing them to use the same standards they use elsewhere rather than technology exclusive to Japan.

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Wireless Charging

Madison Square Garden, Starbucks, Delta Air Lines Sky Clubs, and other venues are starting to embed charging stations into tables and bars as a service for their customers and for the cachet of providing a cutting-edge technology. The charging time is comparable to wired connections. Problem is, there isn't yet a common standard, so enabled phones won't work with every charging surface.

The first North American cars with Qi built in could come out in mid-2013.

To hedge their bets, some automakers and other companies are testing multiple standards. Others are embedding several technologies into their gear. The ultimate winning standard of wireless charging may not emerge until at least 2014.

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Electronic copyright laws are bugging readers—and authors

Cracking the digital-rights management (DRM) that secures works that are distributed electronically, such as e-books and films, is illegal in many countries. But it can be tempting when rules seem unfair or arbitrary. Calibre, a free software programme, can be fitted with a third-party plug-in to strip the DRM from proprietary e-book formats. It has over 11m users. Other more furtive means are available too. David Price, head of piracy intelligence at NetNames, a brand-protection firm, says no DRM system has yet remained uncracked.

Cory Doctorow, a blogger and author (who gives his books away free on the internet) says “rotten lawmaking” has set market terms that nobody wants—including many authors and publishers, who would prefer a more open system. In July Macmillan was the first book publisher of the “Big Six” to free its science fiction and fantasy e-book range from DRM. It termed the restrictions on copying and moving content a “constant annoyance”, for readers. In August Harvard Business Review Press launched an outlet for e-books, also DRM-free. In October sales of the “Humble eBook Bundle”, a package of no-locks books for which consumers paid whatever they wanted (and chose how to split it between the author and a charity), was a big success. The average price paid was a record $14. Consumers seem to reward authors who trust them with their content.

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The merger of two big publishers shows the book business’s challenges

In only three years the page has turned for electronic books; American publishers generated $2.1 billion in revenues from them last year, up by more than 3,200% from 2008, according to BookStats, which tracks the industry. In theory e-books offer better margins, because they are cheaper to produce. But publishers fret that customers will soon expect to pay less for all books. That won’t be so good for profits.

And an even greater threat than Amazon looms. According to Claudio Aspesi, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein, a bank, the march of Penguin and others into digital formats could make them more vulnerable to piracy. E-books are easy to share by e-mail and speedy to steal: it can take around four seconds to download a pirated version of “The Help”, a novel about servants, but over three hours to download the film. If piracy hits publishing like it hit music, profits could evaporate, he says. Here’s hoping for a happier ending.

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Papers like GOP

When it comes to audience, the American newspaper industry looks a lot like the Republican Party. The print audience — the audience that still responsible for 80 percent or more of almost all newspaper companies’ revenue — strongly parallels the Romney vote in almost every category: age, ethnicity, and gender. Older, White, and male. Read more here

New Ways to tell Stories

The Guardian's graphic novel here.

Activision, the Anti-Zynga

According to industry tracker NPD Group, the number of people in the U.S. playing video games fell by 5 percent last year, to an estimated 211.5 million from 222.5 million. Among the categories that declined was light PC gamers, comprising people who play a few minutes a day on Facebook and other PC-based platforms.

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GoPro Widens the View of Its Customer Base

GoPro cameras allow action-sports enthusiasts to take professional-quality videos. Of the million or so HD Hero2 cameras the company sold in 2011, many were purchased by consumers who don’t have thrill seeking on their minds. Couples are leaving them on tables at weddings instead of disposable cameras. On Oct. 17, Woodman Labs introduced a new model called the HD Hero3 that’s 25 percent lighter and 30 percent smaller than its predecessor. It offers better resolution, clearer audio, and slower slow-mo. The HD Hero3 comes in models priced at $200 to $400, each with built-in Wi-Fi that allows people to control their camera remotely using an iPhone or Android app.


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Governments and internet firms are wrestling with the rules for free speech online

The arrest of a senior executive rarely brings helpful headlines. But when Brazilian authorities briefly detained Google’s country boss on September 26th—for refusing to remove videos from its YouTube subsidiary that appeared to breach electoral laws—they helped the firm repair its image as a defender of free speech.

Two weeks earlier those credentials looked tarnished. Google blocked net users in eight countries from viewing a film trailer that had incensed Muslims. In six states, including India and Saudi Arabia, local courts banned the footage. In Egypt and Libya, where protesters attacked American embassies and killed several people, Google took the video down of its own accord.

The row sparked concern about how internet firms manage public debate and how companies based in countries that cherish free speech should respond to states that want to constrain it. (Freedom House, a campaigning think-tank, reckons that restrictions on the internet are increasing in 20 of the 47 states it surveys.)

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France: Twitter erupts in anti-Semitism

“The most nauseating displays of anti-Semitism” have flooded French Twitter feeds in recent weeks, said Alain Granat in Jewpop.com.

Twitter took the posts down after a Jewish group threatened to sue, but Twitter is not really the problem, said Philippe Le Claire in L’Union (Reims). The entire Internet is. Because it’s so easy to hide one’s identity, extremists can “develop and maintain websites, blogs, and Facebook pages with writing so hate-filled it’s chilling.”

That’s because the Internet is conditioning us all to adopt the American attitude toward free speech, said Flavien Hamon in Le Monde. Just as watching U.S. cop shows “alters our understanding of French justice,” our use of Internet platforms developed in the U.S. has warped our understanding of freedom of expression. In the U.S., it is perfectly legal “to belong to a neo-Nazi group or wear a T-shirt with a racist slogan.” Here, it is not. French society believes that freedom of expression does not extend to hate speech.

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The danger of short web addresses

LINK rot afflicts the connective tissue of the internet. If sites rejig their content carelessly, useful web addresses (technically known as URLs) may bring up only an error message. Shortening services turn long web addresses into handy short ones: That is particularly handy for those constrained by Twitter’s 140-character message limit. But short links are useful anywhere on the internet where concision is valued.

Convenience has its cost. Manufactured short links are particularly prone to link rot. They contain no clue about the ultimate destination. If the providers vanish, so do all the vital signposts they have created and stored.

Of around 1,000 link shorteners launched since 2001, 600-odd had folded by May 2012 according to yi.tl (a new service). Many were used as disguise by spammers and scammers. But bona fide services have failed, too.

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Meet the New Boss: Big Data

For more and more companies, the hiring boss is an algorithm. The factors they consider are different than what applicants have come to expect. Jobs that were once filled on the basis of work history and interviews are left to personality tests and data analysis, as employers aim for more than just a hunch that a person will do the job well. Under pressure to cut costs and boost productivity, employers are trying to predict specific outcomes, such as whether a prospective hire will quit too soon, file disability claims or steal.

Personality tests have a long history in hiring. What's new is the scale. Powerful computers and more sophisticated software have made it possible to evaluate more candidates, amass more data and peer more deeply into applicants' personal lives and interests.

The new hiring tools are part of a broader effort to gather and analyze employee data. Globally, spending on so-called talent-management software rose to $3.8 billion in 2011, up 15% from 2010, according to research firm Gartner.

It isn't just big companies that are turning to software for hiring help. Richfield Management LLC, a Flint, Mich., waste-disposal firm that employs 200 garbage collectors, was looking for ways to screen out applicants who were likely to get hurt and abuse workers' compensation.

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Mag Bag: Ad Pages Continue To Fall

2012 is shaping up to be another lousy year for consumer magazines, at least as far as print advertising is concerned. According to the latest quarterly tally from the Publishers Information Bureau, total ad pages fell 8% to 36,059 in the third quarter of this year. That follows similar declines in the first and second quarters of the year; in the first nine months of 2012, ad pages are down 8.6% to 110,843.

Out of 216 titles tracked by PIB, 153 experienced declines in ad pages in the third quarter, including 88 which experienced declines of 10% or more, and 41 which experienced declines of 20% or more.

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Twitter blocks its first account for hate speech

Twitter said on Wednesday that it has blocked the account of a neo-Nazi group at the request of the German government, something that the company announced earlier this year it had the ability to do — although it said at the time that it would try hard to only use this feature in extreme circumstances, and would record its behavior at Chilling Effects so that everyone would know.

Although Twitter has blocked accounts for other reasons — including the controversial blocking of a Financial Times journalist who criticized the network’s corporate partner, NBC, during the Summer Olympics — this is the first time it has done so at the request of a foreign government. Since its inception, Twitter has boasted that it sees itself as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party." The question is where Twitter will draw the line when free speech conflicts with its desire to either promote its corporate partnerships or make peace with foreign governments.

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Number of Americans Who Read Print Newspapers Continues Decline

While Americans enjoy reading as much as ever – 51% say they enjoy reading a lot, little changed over the past two decades – a declining proportion gets news or reads other material on paper on a typical day. Many readers are now shifting to digital platforms to read the papers.

Only 29% now say they read a newspaper yesterday – with just 23% reading a print newspaper. Over the past decade, the percentage reading a print newspaper the previous day has fallen by 18 points (from 41% to 23%). Somewhat more (38%) say they regularly read a daily newspaper, although this percentage also has declined, from 54% in 2004. Figures for newspaper readership may not include some people who read newspaper content on sites that aggregate news content, such as Google News or Yahoo News.

Over the past decade, there have been smaller declines in the percentages of Americans reading a magazine or book in print (six points and four points, respectively) than for newspapers.

Substantial percentages of the regular readers of leading newspapers now read them digitally. Currently, 55% of regular New York Times readers say they read the paper mostly on a computer or mobile device, as do 48% of regular USA Today and 44% of Wall Street Journal readers. Read more

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In Defense of Pinterest

Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you express the nature of your depression? So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings. It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. “This way we can really identify what’s going on,” Rice says.

As Rice discovered with her clients, Pinterest’s appeal is that it gives us curiously powerful visual ways to communicate, think, and remember. If you see one picture of a guitar, it’s just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to see guitarness. This additive power is precisely what helps Rice’s clients paint their internal worlds.

Part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination.

Granted, Pinterest encourages plenty of dubious behavior too. It can be grindingly materialistic; all those pins of stuff to buy! Marketers are predictably adrool, and as they swarm aboard, the whole service might very well end up collapsing into a heap of product shilling.

But I suspect we’ll see increasingly odd and clever ways of using Pinterest. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those collections are worth millions.

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the Copyright Alert System

The nation’s major internet service providers by year’s end will institute a so-called six-strikes plan, the “Copyright Alert System” initiative backed by the Obama administration and pushed by Hollywood and the major record labels to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws.

The plan, now four years in the making, includes participation by AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. After four offenses, the historic plan calls for these residential internet providers to initiate so-called “mitigation measures” (.pdf) that might include reducing internet speeds and redirecting a subscriber’s service to an “educational” landing page about infringement. The internet companies may eliminate service altogether for repeat file-sharing offenders, although the plan does not directly call for such drastic action.

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Trust in Media Survery

Only 8 percent of Americans say they have a "great deal" of trust in the news media, according to a new Gallup poll -- a record low for the 40 years Gallup has been polling the question.

This combined 40 percent who were generally trustful of the media was the lowest percentage ever. Meanwhile, 39 percent said they had “not very much” trust and 21 percent said they had “none at all"—zero confidence in the media and making 60 percent who said they were generally distrustful of the media.

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Inside Brand Journalism

Brand journalism (is) marketers using the tools of digital publishing and social media to speak directly to consumers. The advertising industry commonly refers to it as content marketing, brands disintermediating news professionals by writing and distributing thought leadership content.

Special features, special sections, sponsored content and similar revenue-driving content features involve editorial conflicts that result in professional compromises.

In marketing you’re trained to leave out the bad and the ugly for good reason: you have to protect the company, your customers, your partners and your shareholders. We’re learning that we have to let go a little. Loosen up our collar a bit to reach our audience at their place and in a more conversational style that’s conducive to dialogue and engagement.

Read more at Forbes

What Data says about us

"Big" data is something of a misnomer. It's colossal. From the beginning of recorded time until 2003, we created 5 billion gigabytes of data. In 2011 the same amount was created every two days. By 2013 that time will shrink to 10 minutes. The amount of information we take in in a single day is more than someone living in the 16th century would view in his entire lifetime.

The book from which this excerpt is drawn, The Human Face of Big Data, is created by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt.

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Google, Publishers Resolve Copyright Battle

Google and the Association of American Publishers have resolved a longstanding legal battle about the search giant's book digitization project... The settlement allows publishers to decide whether to exclude their books from Google's Library Project. When publishers allow their books to remain in Google's search index, the company will be able to display up to 20% of the work and sell digital versions through Google Play. Publishers who don't remove their books will also be able to receive a digital copy for their use.

While the deal resolves the publishers' battle with Google, the company is still facing a lawsuit by the Authors Guild. U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin recently said that case could proceed as a class-action, but Google appealed the ruling to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. That case is now on hold while the appellate court reviews whether class-action status is appropriate.

The legal proceedings date to 2005, when the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers sued Google for infringing copyright by scanning books from public libraries. In addition to digitizing the books, Google made them searchable and displayed snippets through its search engine.

Google has always argued that it has a fair use right to scan in books and display snippets, but the issue hasn't yet been litigated.

In 2008, Google reached a $125 million settlement with authors and publishers, but the deal was scuttled by Chin due to antitrust concerns.

That deal was controversial because it would have allowed Google to digitize orphan works -- books under copyright, but whose owner isn't known -- without fear of copyright infringement lawsuits. Currently, no one can publish orphan works without risking liability -- which can run as high as $150,000 per infringement. For that reason, Amazon and other companies said that the deal would have disadvantaged them.

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Facebook Hits Major Milestone: 1 Billion Active Users

Facebook hit a major milestone today: The biggest social network in the world now has 1 billion active users each month. That means that one in seven people in the world are Facebook users.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

"The next billion will be a lot tougher than the first. One big reason: A third of the world's population can't access Facebook. The Chinese government has blocked access to the website since 2009, although many still scale the "great firewall" to use it.

Along with the announcement, Facebook also released a bunch of statistics (.doc). Among them:

— The median age of the users signing up for Facebook in the week leading up to milestone was 22.

— The top users of Facebook were: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States. Facebook listed them alphabetical order, not by usage.

— The average user had 305 friends.

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More Declines Predicted For Newspapers

All the trend lines for newspaper advertising are pointing down, and the latest forecast from eMarketer does nothing to dispel this gloomy picture. According to the research firm’s most recent report, total ad revenues for newspapers will decline from $22.5 billion in 2012 to $21.5 billion in 2013, $21 billion in 2014, $20.63 billion in 2015, and $20.4 billion in 2016, for a 9.5% drop over the next four years.

Separately, newspapers’ digital ad revenues will continue to experience modest growth, but not enough to offset losses on the print side. Here, eMarketer sees total digital ad revenues edging up from $3.4 billion in 2012 to $4 billion in 2016, for a 17.6% increase in four years.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, total newspaper ad revenues -- including print and digital -- plunged from $49 billion in 2006 to $24 billion in 2011, for a 51.5% decline in just five years.

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Television Top Source of Local News

A Pew study released Wednesday finds television to be the top source of local news in both rural and urban areas. The study is divided into four categories — large cities, suburbs near large cities, small towns or cities and rural areas. Local television tops each category as the most-accessed news source among survey respondents, besting word of mouth, local radio and the print version of a local newspaper.

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TV Remains Decision Driver For Purchases

A study commissioned by the TVB shows that local television is the dominant influencer of decisions throughout the purchase funnel from awareness at the top through purchase at the bottom. Research shows that 64% of respondents say TV is the “primary action driver” of awareness and 39% of purchase. Newspapers came in second with awareness at 10%. The Internet (online behavior save email) was second at 10% for purchase.

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A journalist’s quick guide to Reddit

Sure, Reddit was already the unofficial “front page of the Internet,” the soul of all things meme, the secret sauce behind BuzzFeed’s viral posts, a breaking news curator and a Q&A forum for journalists, celebrities, newsmakers.

But then President Obama did a surprise Q&A appearance Wednesday that nearly crashed servers and drew almost 23,000 comments and questions. Obama didn’t bestow legitimacy upon Reddit — with nearly 40 million visitors and 3.2 billion pageviews a month, it already had that. But the visit from a sitting president certainly says something about its increasingly mainstream relevance.

The structure: Reddit consists of a bunch of “subreddits,” or topic sections. The most popular stuff bubbles up to the front page, but each post starts and lives on a specific subreddit. Every post, and every comment on every post, can be upvoted or downvoted by each user. Votes are how the community determines the best content, which rises to the top.

Definitions: Like many online communities, Reddit has developed its own shorthand. AMA, the type of post Obama did, stands for “Ask Me Anything.” It’s an open Q&A thread where one notable person answers questions from everyone else. TIL is short for “Today I Learned…” TIL usually precedes a specific surprising fact. Both AMAs and TILs could be occasional sources of story ideas for journalists.

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Web Video Still Hasn’t Made a Dent in TV

TV ad spending hasn’t gone anywhere, and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. Year in, year out, advertisers have been dumping around $70 billion into TV, and the Web video guys really haven’t captured any of it. The growth they have seen comes mostly from ad dollars moved out of other Web properties.

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Why journalists love Reddit

“Journalists everywhere are using it to get ideas for features,” Benji Lanyado, a freelance writer based in London, told me recently. “Stories appear on Reddit, then half a day later they’re on Buzzfeed and Gawker, then they’re on the Washington Post, The Guardian and the New York Times. It’s a pretty established pattern.”

Much of the “inspiration” is simple: journalists trawling Reddit and simply lifting ideas, photos or quotes: sometimes with credit, oftentimes without. But it’s more than just a source of material for aggregators, copycats and rip-off artists. Look a little deeper and Reddit’s news filter is also influential in other, less visible ways.

The site’s huge traffic (now more than three billion page views a month) means that it pushes through a lot of attention. Stories that rise to the top of the site can suddenly get propelled into the stratosphere — meaning that other media outlets, including TV news, have a greater chance of spotting them. The voracious, skeptical approach of many redditors also acts as a sort of built-in fact checking service for journalists too lazy or time-poor to do the legwork themselves:

And then there’s the site’s original content — things like the AMA sub-section, which has turned into an interview slot and confessional all in one. These real-life stories have helped turn Reddit from a simple link machine into something that creates its own stories, with the result that it’s constantly driving headlines.

The utility of Reddit for journalists is such that Lanyado has decided to build The Reddit Edit, a skinned version of the site. It’s aimed, at least in part, at that diminishing cadre of media workers who still shy away from the site. It looks more presentable than its parent, and puts forward only the hottest stories across a variety of topics: if Reddit calls itself “the front page of the internet”, then The Reddit Edit would be the 60 second news bulletin.

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Taking the E-Book Revolution to Africa

Worldreader is shipping Amazon’s single-purpose Kindle reader to schools and communities in sub-Saharan Africa with a near-term goal of providing 1 million e-books to children in the largely English-speaking countries of Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya in the next year.

(It) persuaded Amazon’s hardware engineers to work on reinforcing the casing of the donated devices so they don’t succumb to the harsh environmental conditions of the region. Worldreader also uses special software so that every few weeks free e-books can be wirelessly delivered over cellular networks to kid’s devices. The U.S. Department of State (announced) in June a pilot program to purchase 2,500 Kindles as part of its own global e-reader program. But the initiative, which had not been opened to other e-reader makers, wilted under criticism that it didn’t take into account the needs of sight-impaired people and the government was playing favorites in the competitive e-reading market.

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Video games dominate Kickstarter’s list of biggest projects.

SINCE its launch three years ago, Kickstarter, a website on which people who want to make things can ask other people to pay for their projects, has offered hope to penniless musicians, artists and designers. But what the world’s modern Medicis really want to bankroll is new video games. Of the ten most-funded Kickstarter projects, five are related to video games

One reason that games get financed is that gamers are tech-savvy. With an average age in America of 37, they also have plenty of disposable income. They expect no return on their money, save a free or cut-price copy of the game itself.

There are structural reasons within the games industry for Kickstarter’s popularity, too. As development budgets for games have risen, says Aubrey Hesselgren, a games-industry programmer, big publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision have become risk-averse. Like Hollywood studios before them, they have taken the safe option of churning out endless sequels to already-popular titles in big-selling genres, such as military-themed shooting games. That leaves a long tail of disgruntled fans who can’t find new games they enjoy. The three biggest Kickstarter games are all from underserved genres.

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Multiscreen TV-Tablet Viewing Soars

Almost two-thirds of tablet owners, 63%, watch TV while using their tablets, per a study from GfK MRI. The research says this is significantly more than any other activity done concurrent with tablet usage.

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Newspaper that plays audio

A print version of the Lancashire Evening Post has been created with a button to allow readers to press the newspaper and play audio. The "smart" newspaper is the latest prototype from an 18-month research project led by the University of Central Lancashire.

Called Interactive Newsprint, the project aims to find a way of connecting a print newspaper to the internet. The newspaper sends a signal to a server to play the audio and gathers data on how many people have clicked to listen.



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People use TV differently

During the first three months of 2012, the average consumer spent about 2 percent less time watching traditional TV than the previous year, Nielsen said. They more than made up for that by spending more time watching material recorded on DVRs or on the Internet through TVs, computers and mobile devices.

The typical consumer spends 14 minutes a day using gaming consoles, although it's more for owners of Wii, XBox and PlayStation 3, Nielsen said. Many of these devices are also popular sites for accessing video, Turrill said.

"The gaming devices are becoming entertainment hubs," she said.

People over age 65 spend nearly 48 hours, on average, watching television each week, Nielsen said. At the other end of the spectrum are teenagers aged 12 to 17, who spend an average of 22 hours per week watching TV.

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Local News Trumps Cable In Viewer Numbers

Despite all the big brand awareness of the major cable news networks, the TV station community would like you to know that local TV news programs still deliver much bigger numbers in the respective major markets.

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A New Language of Journalism

OLD LANGUAGE OF JOURNALISM
Editors, reporters, stories, readers, anchors, viewers, advertisers, church, state, page one, column inches, rating points, photos, op-ed, sound bite, rewrite, correction, rim, slot, copy, blue line, press run, bull pen, bull dog edition, cover, picas, pages, broadcast, networks, broadsheet, bound, full bleed, register, takeout, ahed, lede story, copydesk, overnight, typeset, plate, inverted pyramid, wire, transmit, press time, stringer, “special to,” foreign correspondent, bureau, phoner, spike, kill, presses, stet, double truck, dateline, notebook, file, night editor, copy boy, jump page, in depth, breaking, paid circ.

NEW LANGUAGE OF JOURNALISM
Content creators, posts, participants, comments, marketers, transparency, RSS feeds, authenticity, context, monetize, platform, CMS, video, engagement, data, brands, accountability, aggregation, self-correcting, search, social, friends, curate, distribution, promotion, product manager, project manager, impressions, screens, pixels, galleries, writer, blogger, blog, voice, update, conversation, dialogue, flow, streams, producer, slideshow, terminal, unique visitors, repeat visitors, time spent, page views, tweets, likes, check in, yield, apps, swipe, delete, scroll, timely, relevant, engaging, pay, free, UI, UX, algorithm, SEO, SMO.

THE OLD AND NEW MEET
Old or new, much of the language talks about journalism’s need to observe, interpret and select, with all the biases that entails, conscious or not. The old language of journalism speaks to a moment in history, one defined by technology and social change that bestowed upon reporters and editors the power (often arrogantly perceived as authority) to be the sole collectors and decision-makers of worthy news. The new language of journalism speaks to new technologies and societal upheavals that democratize the journalistic processes of covering and distributing the news.

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Instagram Gaining Ground On Facebook

A recent study by app analytics firm found Instagram has become the second-most-popular app behind Facebook globally. It was the most downloaded social app in July across the 10 largest markets it tracks. While the report acknowledged a panel of six (five females, one male) is only a tiny sample, it believes more young people are discussing shifting away from Facebook to Instagram. Facebook acquired Instagram in April for $1 billion, partly to neutralize a fast-rising rival.

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More Data Beats Better Algorithms — Or Does It?

If you have to choose, having more data does indeed trump a better algorithm. However, what is better than just having more data on its own is also having an algorithm that annotates the data with new linkages and statistics which alter the underlying data asset. That way, the addition of each new algorithm radically improves the underlying data asset, just like the addition of a sensory input improves the way we experience the world around us.

http://allthingsd.com/20120907/more-data-beats-better-algorithms-or-does-it/

Google Fiber Splits Along Kansas City’s Digital Divide

Google’s effort to bring ultra-high-speed internet to a major American city could end up reinforcing the digital divide.

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‘Hope’ Poster Artist Sentenced to Two Years Probation

Shepard Fairey, the Los Angeles designer who created the famous poster of then-Senator Barack Obama next to the word “hope,” using an Associated Press photo as a base, was sentenced in a New York court earlier today as a result of AP’s litigation against him. He will face two years of probation and a $25,000 fine. Mr. Fairey had admitted that he tampered with evidence in his own legal efforts against the AP.

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Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars

Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups, was founded by two fresh graduates of the University of Virginia in 2005, has just 20 employees, but serves up more than three billion page views a month.

With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

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New copyright rules for the digital age

Canada passed a law in June that sets a new standard of permissiveness. Britain too plans to introduce internet-friendly legislation this autumn. As with Canada’s law, the recommended new code entails exemptions for non-commercial uses and user-generated content. Another innovation is a copyright exemption for companies engaged in text- and data-mining (known as “big data”). Ireland and Australia are considering an exception that allows content legally obtained on one device to be accessed on another, called “format shifting”. Without such a provision, cloud-computing and digital-storage companies could be accused of abetting infringement. The Netherlands, South Korea and India are reviewing their copyright laws too.The tide is not all one way. EU officials want to maintain rules whereby computer users pay a small tithe on digital products to collection societies. These fees are meant to go to content creators but often end up enriching the middlemen instead.

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Preserving the Internet for posterity

There are not even any screen shots of the world’s first web page—the one that actually launched the World Wide Web in August 1991. Amid the explosive growth of internet services such as e-mail, music downloads and video streaming, along with the growth of the web itself, little thought has been given to recording information for posterity. The rapid turnover of content on the web has made total loss the norm. Lacking cultural artefacts, society has no mechanism to learn from previous mistakes.

Internet Archive (is) a free internet library capable of storing a copy of every web page of every website ever to go online. The Wayback Machine allows users to view the library’s archived web pages as they appeared when published. Today the Internet Archive also includes texts, audio, moving images and software. At the last count, its collection contained more than 150 billion items.

An interesting spin-off from the Internet Archive is the Open Library, which aims to provide a web page for every book in existence. The Open Library is not to be confused with Project Gutenberg, founded by the late Michael Hart, the inventor of the electronic book back in 1971. Project Gutenberg offers some 40,000 e-books that can be downloaded free in any of the popular e-reader formats.

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To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?

IN 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to acquaintances who would, in turn, pass them on to get the packages closer to their intended final recipients. His famous result was that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people. In 2011 Facebook analysed the 721m users of its social-networking site and found that an average of 4.7 hops could link any two of them via mutual friends.

Can this be used to solve real-world problems, by taking advantage of the talents and connections of one’s friends, and their friends? That is the aim of a new field known as social mobilization. It could potentially be used to help locate missing children, find a stolen car or track down a suspect.

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NASA ramps up investment in educational technology

An upcoming $10 million massively multi-player video game would simulate life on Mars and eventually provide 100 hours of playing time on the iPad, Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox. When a beta version of “Starlite” is released later this year, it will be NASA’s biggest foray into gaming, and one that Laughlin hopes will set the stage for future collaborations with commercial game developers.

In the past few years, NASA has released an air traffic control simulator for the iPhone, a trivia game called “Space Race Blastoff” for Facebook and “MoonBase Alpha,” a multi-player game that cost $300,000 to develop and resulted in 20 minutes of playing time.

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Flipboard's app

Flipboard, an app that displays content from Facebook (FB), Twitter, magazines, and newspapers on an elegant interface... faces competition from other newsreading apps, including Google Currents, Yahoo!’s (YHOO) Livestand, and Pulse, which has 15 million users and generates revenue by selling both advertising and digital subscriptions. To set itself apart from the crowded field, Flipboard boasts that more than 1.4 million people use its app daily, and that its users typically read its content for 86 minutes a month on their iPads and smartphones. The company also says advertisers are getting about 3 percent of users to click on their ads. By comparison, Facebook’s click-through rate is just 0.06 percent, according to a May report by Marin Software, an online advertising company.

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Find Out How Many Fake Twitter Followers You Have

StatusPeople is a humbling web application that reveals the percentage of followers that are fake or inactive. Obama has a whopping 31% fake followers (or 6 million of 19 million), Twitter queen, Lady Gaga, has 27%–which makes us feel like a people magnet with a comparatively tiny 20%. Twitter occasionally cleanses its universe of robots with a mass purge, but is clearly struggling to keep up a motivated army of spammers and purchased accounts.

“There’s a tremendous cachet associated with having a large number,” comedian Dan Nainan told The New York Times, after admitting to buying 220,000 fake followers.

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U.S. pay meters nearing 300

The number of U.S. newspapers with metered paywalls or other digital-subscriber initiatives has more than doubled in the past year as publishers race to boost their digital circulation revenues. Some 300 U.S. newspapers are now charging a fee to read their digital content, according to News & Tech research.

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Mobile money

Mobile money would transform even more lives in poor countries if regulators got out of the way. Mobile-money services are especially useful in developing countries. A worker in the city can send money to his family in the village without having to waste a day travelling on a rickety bus. Indeed, he can pay his family’s household bills directly from his phone. It is safer too: nobody wants to carry wads of currency on public transport.

Mobile money also gives its users—many of whom are poor and have no access to banks—a way to save small amounts of money. Mobile transactions are more traceable than cash, making it harder for corrupt officials to embezzle undetected. And lately Kenya has discovered a further benefit: the success of M-PESA has provided the foundation for a group of start-ups in Nairobi that are building new products and services on top of it

However Kenya’s success has yet to be replicated much elsewhere. More than half of all the world’s mobile-money transactions are handled by Safaricom. Mobile money is popular in one or two chaotic countries, such as Sudan and Somalia, but barely used in most places where it could do immense good, including India and China.

Not all countries need mobile money, of course. Rich countries, with cash machines, credit cards and internet banking, have little use for it.

In Kenya the government took the enlightened approach of allowing M-PESA to go ahead, rather than tying Safaricom in red tape. Many of the poor countries that would most benefit from mobile money seem intent on keeping its suppliers out—mainly by insisting they should be regulated like banks. This is often a mixture of laziness and turf protection: if the president’s cousin owns the country’s main bank, he may not rush to let cheap mobile-money systems into his country.

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Minority employment up in TV and radio, widening gap with print

Television and radio employed more minority journalists last year than the year before, according to the latest release from RTDNA’s annual survey. Minorities now account for 21.5 percent of the television workforce, up from 20.5 percent the year before, and 11.7 percent of the radio workforce, up from 7.1 percent in 2011.

TV continues to clobber newspapers in most measurements of diversity. Earlier this year ASNE figures showed the percentage of minority employees continued to decline in print newsrooms.

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Agencies Don't Pin Pinterest

Pinterest may be the darling of the social media world, but it has not been widely embraced by agencies. A new survey by the Creative Group finds that only 7% of advertising and marketing executives said their firms are using the visual social network for business purposes and 44% have no interest in adopting Pinterest.

Another 18% had never heard of the site, and 17% said it caught their eye but they were hesitant about using it for work. Just 10% said they planned to start using Pinterest as a business-related tool.

Pinterest enjoyed meteoric growth earlier this year, becoming the fastest stand-alone site to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark, according to comScore. As of July, it had 23 million monthly visitors.

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A new boss for an old paper

The New York Times Company (has) appointed Mark Thompson, the departing director-general of the BBC, a British public broadcaster, as its new boss. But Mr Thompson is an odd choice to lead a big, struggling private company. One analyst uncharitably compares his appointment to hiring the boss of a big charity to do a corporate turnaround. Mr Thompson has spent most of his career in public-service broadcasting at the BBC, save for a few years as boss of Britain’s Channel 4 television, a commercial broadcaster. The BBC is state-backed, and owes its survival to a tax on every household in Britain with a television set.

Last year it adjusted its pay wall and by June had boosted the number of digital subscribers to 509,000 between the New York Times and its stablemate, the International Herald Tribune, up by 12% in three months. However, the company still relies on advertisers for over 40% of its revenues, and online advertising rates are lower than those in print. Mr Thompson will have to devise a more radical business plan than trying to catch print papers’ fleeing subscribers.

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the impact of digital technology on the Islamic World

A recent survey by Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that rich Muslim-majority countries boast some of world’s highest rates of smartphone penetration, with the United Arab Emirates ahead at 61%. But even in poorer Muslim lands adoption is respectable: 26% in Egypt, not much below Germany’s 29%. More than a third of people in the Middle East now use the internet, slightly above the world average.

Muslims use their gadgets in much the same way as everyone else: they text, they use social networks, they buy online. But the adoption—and Islamification—of the technology has a deeper meaning, says Bart Barendregt of Leiden University, who has studied South-East Asia’s growing digital culture. “Muslim youngsters are adopting technology to distance themselves from older, traditional practices while also challenging Western models,” he argues.

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They All Want to Know Your Face

Next time you’re looking up at a billboard, there’s a chance it may be looking back down at you. Immersive Labs has developed software for digital billboards that can measure the age range, gender, and attention-level of a passerby and quantify the effectiveness of an outdoor marketing campaign. Beyond just bringing metrics to outdoor advertisements, facial detection technology can tailor ads to people based on their features.

Vending machines have been making a high-tech resurgence, selling everything from iPods to high-end cupcakes – some now include cameras that are analyzing your face. Facial detection technology can enable a machine to present a customer with items they would typically purchase based on their physical characteristics.

With today’s Internet-connected TVs and attached devices, companies have a chance to peek into the living room to see who’s around. Microsoft Kinect, the popular motion-sensing gaming device, has advanced abilities to identify its users and has built an entire advertising platform around “audience engagement” – being able to tell who is in the room, how old they are and whether they are paying attention to what is on the screen.

Today, these types of sensors may be part of the television when you purchase it already; in the last year alone, Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, and Toshiba have each introduced “Smart TVs” with facial recognition technology built in.

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Radio still dominates music discovery

Radio remains by far the main way US consumers discover music, despite the likes of YouTube and other rival options, according to research by Nielsen. Its Nielsen Music 360 Report of 3,000 online consumer surveys found 48% of those questioned discover music most often through radio stations, compared to 10% from friends and relatives and 7% from YouTube. However, when it comes to listening to music YouTube rules among teenagers with 64% saying they use it to hear music compared to 56% listening to music on the radio, 53% through iTunes and 50% to music on CD.

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AP Stylebook moves faster than Merriam-Webster as linguistic authority

Merriam-Webster has officially sanctioned a bunch of words by adding them to the dictionary, hereby removing most of the fun of saying things like “F-bomb” and “sexting.” Merriam-Webster paints this as a way of keeping up with the changing nature of language, but of course we all know that it’s a direct challenge to the AP Stylebook, which every cardiganed copy editor knows is the true arbiter of a journalist’s vocabulary.

The inclusion of these words raises an interesting question: Which is more in tune with the English language: Merriam-Webster, which traces its origins to the early 1800s, or the AP’s Stylebook, which only two years ago sanctioned “website“?

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Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall

Magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore. Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.

Historically, certain categories of magazine will encounter turbulence, but this time all categories were punished in the pileup.

It’s not just consumers who are playing hard to get: advertising is down 8.8 percent year to date over the same miserable period a year ago, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. With readership in such steep decline and advertising refusing to come back, magazines are in a downward spiral that not even their new digital initiatives can halt.

Read more at the NY Times

NYT Hosts Media Fire Sale

Combine a massively disruptive technology (the Internet), a weakened company (The New York Times Co.), and a brutal recession, and what you get is a kind of slow-motion fire-sale.

First went the real estate. Then went the NYT’s stake in the Boston Red Sox and NESN (a regional sports cable network). Then went 16 regional newspapers for $143 million. Next (probably) goes About.com, which the NYT purchased for $410 million years ago and is now desperate to sell for $270 million.

Next (after About.com is unloaded) goes the “New England Media Group,” which is to say: The Boston Globe, The Worcester Telegram and some printing operations in Massachusetts. The sale of the New England Media Group won’t fetch much because it carries on its books large under-funded liabilities (retiree health and pension plans). No sane investment group will take on those liabilities unless they are somehow diminished or at least ring-fenced.

Once all that happens—and it will happen—what will The New York Times Company look like? It will not look like a growth stock. For the foreseeable future, and probably beyond, advertising revenue will remain flat (at best). Subscription revenue might increase a bit; many people would be willing to pay $1000 annually for a complete (paper + online access) NYT package, but a wave of baby boom journalists and editors will be retiring, so the company’s pension and retiree health costs will consequently spike. Those costs will increase with each passing year as more boomer journalists reach retirement age, thus making the Times’ margin for error even smaller than it already is, which is very small. The New York Times Company will look, in a word, vulnerable.

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Are Tablet-Only Publications Dead?

The last few weeks have cast an ominous shadow over this niche industry following substantial staff cuts at News Corp.'s The Daily and a decision by the Huffington Post to give up on charging for its iPad magazine after just five issues. While some media observers are quick to write off the format, many in the industry see recent woes as part of the natural growing pains of an emerging market.

Two years later, however, the tablet publishing market isn't the runaway success many envisioned. Yet despite glaring questions from media pundits, many media buyers and industry veterans are surprisingly calm.
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Aggregators Help Radio Reach Online Audiences

For the radio industry, there may be no better symbol for the challenges of adapting to the digital age than two candy-colored mobile apps. The apps, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, are aggregators — conduits for thousands of online radio streams. With a few taps on a smartphone, a listener can dart among a pop station in New York, gospel in Atlanta and talk almost anywhere.

Both have quickly amassed big audiences. TuneIn, which offers 70,000 streams from around the world, announced on Monday that it has 40 million monthly users. IHeartRadio, owned by the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications, has been downloaded 95 million times and has attracted more than 12 million registered users.

For broadcasters, these aggregators can help reach audiences in the growing but increasingly fragmented world of online radio, which can mean anything from a customized playlist on Pandora or Spotify to an iTunes stream.

For now only a fraction of the radio audience is online; John Hogan, chief executive of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, the company’s radio and online division, said that 98 percent of listening to his company’s stations is still on its terrestrial signals. But it is growing quickly. According to Triton Digital, a company that measures Internet radio audiences, Clear Channel’s online audience has risen 117 percent in the last year. But making money through online radio remains a puzzle, largely because of its royalty structure.

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Social media stocks lose their luster

The shine is off social media stocks, said Scott Thurm in The Wall Street Journal. “Investors who six months ago clamored for shares of social media firms have turned against them with a vengeance.”

Once touted as being worth $100 billion, Facebook is now valued at less than $65 billion and headed lower. With shares of Groupon and Chinese social network Renren also far below their market debuts, investors are “infinitely more skeptical,” said investment consultant Nick Zaharias.

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The Truth About Pay TV: It’s Still Not Shrinking

Reuters says more than 400,000 Americans have dropped pay TV this year. If you want to evaluate the state of the pay-TV business, you have to include the results from the telco guys, who have been taking share from the cable and satellite guys. And you have to look at numbers for the whole year, not a single quarter. Once you do that, you end up with numbers that are basically flat, give or take a few thousand subscribers.

You can argue that the pay-TV industry’s no-growth or barely-there growth is due to a weak economy and lousy household formation numbers. Or you can argue that it’s because people really are swapping out pay TV for Netflix, Apple TV, etc. Or a mix of both, or whatever.

But for now, at least, you can’t argue that the pay-TV industry is shrinking. Read more here

Americans drop pay-TV

More than 400,000 American homes drop their pay-TV service since the start of the year. DirecTV Group, the No.1 U.S. satellite TV provider, revealed its first ever quarterly customer losses on Thursday, with some 52,000 homes dropping the service in the second quarter. That was more than analysts expected from a company long seen as the best run video provider in the industry.

Also on Thursday, Time Warner Cable Inc, the No.2 cable provider said it lost more subscribers than analysts expected with 169,000 customers leaving the service. The biggest U.S. TV distributor, Comcast Corp, lost 176,000 video subscribers.

The idea of cord-cutting has gathered steam as several major technology companies have held talks with program makers about putting together TV packages that will be delivered via the Internet. The idea would be to use cheaper, smaller TV packages to attract customers to buy or use their services. So far Google Inc, Intel Corp and Amazon are among those known to have held talks.

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4 reasons investors don't like Facebook

In a little more than two months since its initial public offering, Facebook has gone from being a stock that investors fought to own to one they can't get away from fast enough. Wednesday, it set a new low. Anyone watching the unrelenting drop may wonder how Facebook's star dimmed so quickly on Wall Street. Four reasons:

•Disconnect between serving consumers vs. investors. The fact that Facebook seems more concerned about designing products than finding ways to profit from them is irking investors.

•Overhype from the start.

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Belo: Sinking Newspaper Revs

A.H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News among other newspapers, saw total revenues decrease 5% from to $109 million in the second quarter of 2012, the company announced Wednesday. Total advertising revenues sank 8%, from second-quarter 2011 to second-quarter 2012, with display ads down 15% to $21.5 million, preprint revenue down 1% to $20 million, and classifieds down 13% to over $13 million. Total digital ad revenues increased 1% to $9 million, while circulation revenues decreased 3% to $34 million.

Last week McClatchy, which publishes newspapers including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Charlotte Observer, reported that total revenues slipped 4.8% to $299 million in the second quarter of 2012.

Lee Enterprises -- which owns almost 50 daily newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- said total revenues decreased 4.3% to $179 million in the second quarter of 2012, due mostly to a nearly 6% drop in advertising revenue, to $125 million.

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A Quarter of E-Commerce Could Be Mobile By 2017

Just about every aspect of desktop migration to devices is accelerating to a pace that many of us couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. ABI Research is now projecting that by the close of 2017, 24.4% of e-commerce will be m-commerce.

The striking estimates are based on what the company calls a “spectacular” doubling of worldwide m-commerce to $65.6 billion in 2011 alone. Rapid adoption of smartphones is driving the consumer side of the equation as developing countries join more mature markets in moving directly to more advanced devices.

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Median Writer and Reporter Wages by State

Here’s how journalist wages compare to the national median ($49,192) for writers/authors by state:

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iPhones make Chinese eyes light up

Ask about Apple inside China and you hear little but praise. It is one of the most admired brands in the Middle Kingdom. A survey last year by researchers at Stanford University found that iPad penetration was greater at an elite high school in Beijing than at one in Palo Alto, California. In the first quarter of this year Apple earned $7.9 billion in greater China, making it the firm’s second-biggest market.

In short, Apple’s products are selling fast and likely to sell even faster. Some predict that China will overtake America to become Apple’s largest market within a few years.

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Transfer of Value

Traditional newspapers that move online are about to lose the war against pure players and aggregators. Armed with the conviction their intellectual superiority makes them immune to digital modernity, newspapers neglected today’s internet driving forces: relying on technology to build audiences and the ability to coalesce a community over any range of subjects — even the most mundane ones.

On one side, legacy medias: Great franchises who grew on strong values, such as “pristine” journalism, independence, storytelling, fact-checking, solid editing, respect for the copyright… Along the way, they made their share of mistakes, but, overall, the result is great. After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers. Now, this (aging) fraternity faces a new generation of media people who build their fiefdom on a completely different set of values. For instance, the notion of copyright has become exceedingly elastic.

Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashion publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo’s clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will make tens or hundred times better traffic-wise. Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake-up.

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Why Murdoch’s The Daily Doesn’t Fly

Rupert Murdoch might pull the plug on The Daily which looses $30 million a year. But, in an open email to the publication’s staff, Jesse Angelo, its editor-in-chief, was quick to deny such rumors. Eighteen months ago, The Daily was held up as embodying the newsmedia’s future. It was the first to be designed for the iPad. Fact is, The Daily never took-off. Six months after its high-wattage launch, it only claimed 80,000 paid-for subscribers. Today, Jesse Angelo mentions a mere 100,000 subs. It is both far from the 500,000 necessary to break-even.

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A musical merger could create a new model, or a dozy mammoth

Some are now wondering whether Universal Music Group was wise to gamble quite so much money on EMI’s recorded-music division, which it bought from Citigroup for £1.2 billion ($1.9 billion) in an auction in November last year.

Sales of recorded music have fallen by half in the past decade, from about $13 billion in 2002 to $6.5 billion last year. Downloaded music is much cheaper than the old compact discs. Indeed, thanks to widespread piracy, it is often free.

Digital sales are rising, but are still only a fraction of what CDs used to generate. Subscription services such as Spotify may appeal more to tech-savvy music aficionados than to casual buyers who might once have picked up a CD on the way home from work. Efforts to bundle music with mobile-phone or pay-TV subscriptions have failed to catch on.

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Homebrew apps have arrived

In May Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, unveiled a kit that allows people with no programming skills to create a working app within minutes. Apple, too, has applied for a patent indicating it is also building a DIY tool for iOS, its mobile operating system. And in March the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a beta version of App Inventor, which allows even simpletons to make apps for Android phones.

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The rise of ‘binge viewing’

The “binge viewer” compulsively views whole seasons of drama series in marathon sessions lasting a day or more, using new technologies like on-demand TV, digital video recorders, and streaming websites. Netflix says TV shows now account for 60 percent of its streaming volume, and has even introduced a feature that automatically plays the next episode of a series. TV networks aren’t happy, because binge viewers bypass advertising vital to their business, but the increasingly popular practice is “changing the economics of the industry.”

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Send a draft of your story to a source? Some journalists do it — but be mindful of the risks

A Washington Post reporter’s decision to share a draft of a story with his sources is provoking a healthy discussion in newsrooms about when, if ever, it’s wise to circulate unpublished material for comments.While it’s difficult to say “never, ever,” a story should never — ever — be sent to anyone outside the newsroom without careful consideration of the legal and ethical perils.

The main one is this: Once a reporter establishes a certain fact-checking protocol, then any deviation from that fact-checking protocol risks appearing, to a judge and jury, like a lapse in diligence. Lapses in diligence are, under the law of defamation, a bad thing.

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Social Media Revs To Reach Nearly $17 Billion

Advertising will contribute $9 billion to social media global revenue of nearly $17 billion this year, up from $12 billion in 2011, estimates Gartner. The approximate 43% uptick supports stronger social signals that find their way into search, mobile and premium display ads.

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Tech News and Analysis Events Books Research Home Apple Cleantech Cloud Europe Media Mobile Video gigabarb: #Box embraces #Windows Phone (half heartedly) http://t.co/4lZLS8oJ Could Kickstarter be used to crowdfund journalism?

Under increasing financial pressure from the web and the decline of print advertising, newspapers and other traditional media outlets have been laying off staff and trying to fill the gap with services such as Journatic — the hyper-local aggregator that uses offshore workers — or simply doing without things like copy editors. But are there other solutions to that reporting gap? Crowdsourcing journalism through sites like Reddit could be one, but crowdfunding could be another: one journalist in Michigan has raised funding through a Kickstarter campaign so he can travel around the U.S. interviewing people about the upcoming election. Could crowdfunding allow other journalists to do investigative or in-depth projects as well?

The idea of crowdfunding journalism isn’t a new one: journalist and entrepreneur David Cohn started a company called Spot.us in 2008 to do exactly that, and had some notable successes, such as a feature on the “garbage patch” in the Pacific Ocean, a joint project with the New York Times. Earlier this year, the company was acquired by American Public Media and merged with the Public Insight Network, and the website says it has more than 15,000 contributors and 110 publishing partners (Cohn has since moved on to a new project, a media startup called Circa). Crowdfunding might work better for individuals

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The NYT’s & WSJ’s Push To Online Video

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times often disagree, at least in their editorials, but both are in agreement that the future of the newspaper will involve a healthy dose of video.

It’s not surprising that the leading newspapers are branching out to video. The Web is clearly moving in a less static direction, and big brand advertisers will pay more for sight, sound and motion. Both sites have produced video over the years, and lately it’s starting to pay off in numbers that aren’t exactly YouTube, but aren’t anything to sneeze at either.

According to ComScore, the Times had 561,000 viewers and 1.6 million video views in June. The WSJ had almost 1.3 million viewers who accounted for 4.2 million video views that month.

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Synchronizing Crowdsourced Movies

Vyclone (is a) free program debuted in Apple’s App Store (that) lets two or more people in close proximity shoot video with their iPhones, upload the clips, and view a movie automatically spliced together from different angles. To recognize that multiple users are filming the same scene, Vyclone tags each video with the location where it was shot using GPS. To synchronize the clips, it lines them up by the date and time they were shot, regardless of when they were uploaded. A simple-to-use video editor lets users play director, toggling from one angle to the next with the tap of a finger.

Sumner and Lassman see Vyclone as a tool for citizen journalists, allowing them to weave together a documentary of a live news event. Lassman hopes it will become a killer app for home movies: “I can film the kid blowing out the candles and I can have my buddy filming my wife, who’s sobbing, and I can have somebody else filming grandpa and grandma with their arms around each other enjoying the moment,” he says. “I get Vyclone to stitch that together in a multi-angle movie that tells the full story of the moment.”

While the app is free, Vyclone may begin charging for extras, such as longer movie times and higher resolution.

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The phone and tablet wallet

Perhaps you've read how smartphone payments, already popular in parts of Asia and Europe, are coming to the U.S. in a big way. These are telltale signs that the mobile-payments revolution has arrived.. (but changing) the way Americans pay for stuff is going to be really hard work. Merchants don't want to upgrade pricey point-of-sale terminals so that they can work wirelessly with smartphones unless e-wallets become mainstream, and e-wallets won't become mainstream until consumers can use them just about everywhere.

Not only will the phone or the tablet become a wallet for consumers, but it will also turn into a credit card reader and a register for merchants. Shoppers will use their mobile device as a coupon book, a comparison-shopping tool, and a repository of those unwieldy loyalty cards they carry from everyone from giant retail chains to the corner bakery. And your smartphones will serve as beacons that will alert a retailer when you walk into its store so that it can recommend products, show you reviews, or direct you to aisle five, where that beanbag chair you didn't buy last week still beckons -- and you can now have it for 10% off. You won't even need a few singles to tip the valet or pay the dog walker, because they'll take mobile payments too.

The problem with Square's utopia -- and those of its rivals -- is that it is a bit of a walled garden, for now at least. "You have a potential situation where consumers are confused into doing nothing," says Drew Sievers, CEO of mFoundry, the company that helped Starbucks develop its mobile app.

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IPhone Obsession

“The iPhone has changed everything about how we relate to technology, for both good and bad,” said Larry Rosen, a psychologist and professor who is the author of “IDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). According to his research, almost 30 percent of people born after 1980 feel anxious if they can’t check Facebook Inc. (FB) (FB)’s website every few minutes. Others repeatedly pat their pockets to make sure their smartphones are still there.

In addition to Rosen’s “IDisorder,” there’s Gregory Jantz’s “Hooked: The Pitfalls of Media, Technology & Social Networking” (Siloam, 2012) and James Steyer’s “Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age” (Scribner, 2012). While much of these authors’ concern focuses on social media, the smartphone is what lets people stay constantly connected.

“The great thing about the iPhone is that we carry it with us all day long,” Rosen said. “The bad part is that we carry it with us all day long.”

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NFC Stickers Make Smartphones Smarter

Programmable tags (are) pieces of paper or plastic that sell for a few bucks apiece and communicate with gadgets via a short-range radio technology known as near field communication, or NFC. They can be customized to trigger an action on any phone with an NFC chip: Tap the phone against a tag on a business card to automatically download contact information, for instance, or tap a tag on your nightstand to set the morning alarm.

NFC tags are gaining a following as the number of smartphones able to scan them skyrockets. This year the research firm IHS iSuppli (IHS) expects manufacturers of smart devices will ship nearly 21 million NFC-enabled handsets in the U.S. and 186 million worldwide, up from 93 million last year. According to press reports, Apple (AAPL) is considering adding an NFC chip to the new iPhone expected this fall, which would give the technology a significant boost.

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Chinese Web Users Hit 538 Million

The number of Internet users in China has grown to 538 million, according to a report from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). More Chinese users are accessing the Web from mobile devices than a PC - 388 million vs. 380 million. The new pattern is partly a result of China's mobile Internet prosperity, including easier Web access and lower gadget price tags. More than 100 million Chinese citizens use cell phones to watch video, a 27.7 percent growth from the end of 2011.

Similarly, micro-blogging services like Twitter are on the rise in China, attracting 43.8 percent of the nation's population.

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Why the Washington Post will never have a paywall

The Post is unlike most other newspapers in a fairly critical way: because of the impact that news coming out of Washington, D.C. has on the rest of the world, the paper’s influence and/or potential readership is much broader than its print distribution. So in print, it seems more like a small or medium-sized metropolitan paper — with about 500,000 readers, according to recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations — but its online audience is about 17 million unique visitors a month.

There’s another reason the Post hasn’t jumped on the paywall bandwagon: because the Washington Post CEO’s inclination leans far more towards experimentation with new media formats and platforms than it does towards backwards-looking efforts like paywalls. It’s no coincidence that the Post is probably (next to The Guardian) the newspaper that has tried to innovate the most in digital media, with projects like the Trove news-recommendation service and the Post‘s Facebook social-reader app — or even Social Code itself, which in many ways is a potential alternative to traditional newspaper banner advertising.

As Graham described in an interview with Om last year, the reason why he is interested in experiments like the Facebook reader is because he wants to “go where the readers are” instead of pursuing the traditional media model of trying to convince readers to come and spend all their time at the newspaper’s website.

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Why internet scams seem so obvious

Many crooks (on the Internet) make puzzlingly little attempt to hide their origins (often from Nigeria). In a new paper*, Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research has used maths to show why: blatancy is a means of weeding out all but the most credulous respondents.

He argues that scammers are rational actors. A big cost for them is the time they spend coaxing fully into their net those who show initial interest. So they need to select the most promising targets, rather than timewasters or the wary. “By sending an e-mail that repels all but the most gullible, the scammer gets the most promising marks [victims] to self-select,” he says. 

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The viral Internet

(Memes) is derived from genetics, describing the evolution of ideas and cultural phenomena by natural selection. These days, meme is the catchall for freely copied and altered tidbits of amusing online content, from animations and photo captions to viral videos that inspire a flood of parodies. Within weeks, most fade to oblivion, but those with endurance make the leap to the commercial world.

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Campaign Fundraising Gets a Text

You can already send money to your favorite charity via text message. Now it may not be long before you’ll be able to do the same for political candidates. On June 11 the Federal Election Commission unanimously agreed to let campaigns begin accepting modest political contributions via mobile messaging, a ruling that even campaign finance watchdogs lobbied for as an antidote to the influence of billionaire-funded superPACs.

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Tagging TV Ads

Shazam seemed like magic when it debuted in 2008 on the iPhone. The app can identify nearly any song playing on the radio, even over the din of a coffee shop. It’s been downloaded more than 200 million times and become modestly successful; by steering buyers to iTunes (AAPL) and other music services, it generated about $24 million in revenue for the 12 months ending June 2011, the most recent figures available.

Now Shazam Entertainment is moving away from its musical roots. Over the past 18 months Shazam has built technology so viewers can use the app to take an audio snapshot of TV shows and ads as they would a song.

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YouTube Offers Face-Blurring Tool to Protect Dissidents

Saying it wanted to help to protect dissidents who appear in videos shared on YouTube, Google launched a tool Wednesday that can blur their faces in footage uploaded to its servers.

Google hopes the tool will encourage more people speaking out, though it was careful to call it only a “first step” towards providing safety to people who could face harsh repercussions from governments or drug cartel if they were identified in a video.

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Growing Strength of E-Books

E-books continued their surge in 2011, surpassing hardcover books and paperbacks to become the dominant format for adult fiction last year, according to a new survey of publishers released Wednesday.

Publishers’ net revenue from sales of e-books more than doubled last year, reaching $2.07 billion, up from $869 million in 2010. E-books accounted for 15.5 percent of publishers’ revenues. But as digital revenue grew, print sales suffered, dropping to $11.1 billion in 2011 from $12.1 billion in 2010.

The annual survey, known as BookStats, includes data from nearly 2,000 publishers of all sizes. It was conducted by two trade groups, the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers.

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Why study journalism? Because web audiences want quality, too

In Aaron Sorkin's new drama The Newsroom, idealistic twentysomethings rush about with BlackBerrys plastered to their ears, creating a groundbreaking quality TV news show, pausing only long enough to give set speeches about how to make quality journalism.

There's just one problem: there are hardly any journalists in it.

The development of freely available web publishing systems, free and low-cost video hosting platforms as well as social media - read ''audience building tools'' - have stripped traditional media companies of their monopoly on the production and distribution of content.

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Is ‘new’ media becoming old hat in the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign?

Despite the rapid increase in numbers of politicians on Twitter and Facebook — a trend that also has been seen in Canada — television remains the main source of election news for citizens, Owen said.

Four years ago, 68 per cent of Americans reported they were getting election news mainly from TV. This year, that’s up to 74 per cent, she said, citing studies by the Pew Research Centre.

However, this doesn’t mean that American politicians are abandoning social media, Owen said. In fact, mindful of Twitter’s and Facebook’s clout in 2008, Republicans and Democrats are flooding social media with all kinds of messages, in a far more systematic and organized fashion. But it’s not the interactive dialogue that was once predicted when social media began to be used in politics.

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Tablets, Smartphones Drive Engagement, Ad Response

Consumers are more responsive to ads on tablets than smartphones, but both devices are driving high levels of engagement with advertising and media, according to a new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The research found nearly half (47%) of tablet owners and a quarter of smartphone users interact with ads on their devices at least once a week.

The study also emphasized that mobile no longer means merely “on-the-go,” with virtually all tablet and smartphone owners using their devices at home—the most common place for mobile activity. Tablets are viewed mainly as media consumption devices; smartphones are considered “mission-critical” tools that 70% won’t leave home without.

The increased content consumption via mobile is coming at the expense of traditional media, especially on tablets. Almost a quarter (24%) of tablet owners said they’re watching less TV, and 32% said they’re reading less print news or magazines. (At the same time, 14% are watching more TV, and 17% reading more print material.) For smartphones, 15% and 19% have cut back on TV viewing and print reading, respectively.

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Major news organizations find they have to lighten up to thrive on YouTube

Last year, YouTube celebrated its one trillionth video upload. The site is now the third-most visited site online after Google and Facebook, with more than four billion video views a day, according to a study out today from the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism. Seven years since its inception, YouTube has created “a new kind of television news” that embraces an interplay of professional- and citizen-produced content, according to Pew. Five times in the past 15 months, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was related to a news event, according to Pew.

Even though news organizations uploaded heavily trafficked videos, Pew points out that “the power of the raw pictures and images” — not the expertise or skills that come with professional news training — are what made them popular.

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Digg Sells for Pennies on the Dollar

The remains of social news sharing site Digg were bought by New York-based incubator Betaworks on Thursday. Betaworks would not comment on the price it paid for the once high flying tech company.

Digg is a social news aggregator that lets users vote up popular stories, and down-vote ones they don’t like. The most popular stories appear on the Digg front page. It used to be one of the most fearsome traffic drivers on the Internet, but faltered with a redesign in 2010 that critics complained gave all the leverage to promote stories to publishers, and took it away from the community that had built the site’s popularity. Users started leaving in droves, turning to Twitter to find their news, or Facebook to share links with friends, rather than “Digging” a story. For all the competition that Facebook and Twitter represent, news and community site Reddit is the clear usurper of the former Digg throne. The 7-year-old Reddit has captured many of Digg’s users by building lively communities around topics such as photos, sports teams, and hobbies.

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Memorable TV moments

The most impactful TV moments of the past half-century? The awful “Seinfeld” finale and terrific “Cheers” one have to be up there, right? Same for the “M*A*S*H” finish and so many Olympic golden achievements?

A Nielsen study commissioned by Sony found that no entertainment or sports content made the top 20. Major news events filled the whole list and only one could be considered fully uplifting: Barack Obama’s acceptance speech after the 2008 election (ranked 13th) and the 2011 royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton (14th).

Two others could be considered positive, but negative events engendered them: the 2011 death of Osama Bin Laden (5th) and Saddam Hussein’s capture and death (12th).

The research found the Sept. 11 attacks to be the most impactful, followed in second place by Hurricane Katrina. The 1995 O.J. Simpson verdict came in third, followed by the 1986 Challenger tragedy. Bin Laden’s death completed the top five. Simpson’s white Bronco chase finished sixth, followed by the 2011 Japanese earthquake, Columbine school shooting, 2010 Gulf oil spill and Princess Diana’s funeral.

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TV News Staffing Way Up, More Hiring Expected

Here’s some good news: TV news employment is soaring. According to the annual RTDNA-Hofstra University survey on the state of TV news staffing and profitably, TV news employment is up to the second highest level ever and more hiring is expected over the next year.

There’s more hiring on the horizon, too: 36.7% of news directors polled said that they expected to increase the size of their staffs over the next year.

TV news profitability is also on the rise. In 2012, 59.6% of news stations showed a profit–that’s the highest level it’s been since 1998. Markets 51-100 showed the most profit in 2012, with 68.2% of those stations turning a profit, compared to 54.7% in markets 1-25.

As well, Papper found that there are now 725 TV stations originating local news. Those stations air their news on an additional 242 stations, meaning that there are a total of 967 stations across the country running local news.

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The Fissures Are Growing for Papers

The newspaper industry by all appearances (is) starting to come apart. Between operational fiascos and flailing attempts to slash costs on the fly, it’s clear that the print newspaper business, which has been fretting over a looming crisis for the last 15 years, is struggling to stay afloat. There are smart people trying to innovate, and tons of great journalism is published daily, but the financial distress is more visible by the week.

The bread and butter for most of the industry is local information. But it has become seemingly impossible to make money creating daily compendiums and throwing it on people’s doorsteps. And it’s not just newspapers. AOL’s ambitious local news effort, called Patch, is losing $150 million a year, by some estimates, and is no closer to cracking the code.

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Mapping the tubes

Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet. By Andrew Blum is an excellent introduction to the nuts and bolts of how exactly it all works. The term “internet” is a collective noun for thousands of smaller networks, run by corporations, governments, universities and private business, all stitched together to form one (mostly) seamless, global, “internetworked” whole. In theory, the internet is meant to be widely distributed and heavily resilient, with many possible routes between any two destinations. In practice, a combination of economics and geography means that much of its infrastructure is concentrated in a comparatively small number of places.

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Rumours of a bid by Microsoft for a social network

This month it was reported that Microsoft had agreed to buy one of these upstarts, Yammer, which is less than four years old but boasts more than 5m users in companies, for $1.2 billion. Neither side is commenting on the report.

In part, companies are setting up social networks because they have a generation of employees who are used to communicating this way. To them, not using social networks at the office (or, just as likely, on the road) would be as antiquated an idea as not using smartphones.

At the headquarters in London of Burberry, a British maker of fashionable clothes, 70% of the staff are under 30. “I grew up in a physical world, speaking English,” says Angela Ahrendts, Burberry’s chief executive. “They grew up in a digital world, speaking social.”

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Hearst fires reporter for serial fabrication

Paresh Jha, an award-winning reporter for Hearst Newspapers’ New Canaan News in Connecticut, has been fired for fabricating sources and quotes in at least 25 stories over the nearly two years he worked at the weekly.

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Clear Channel Signs Rivals’ Stations to Its App

How does the biggest radio company in the country become bigger online? By inviting hundreds of competitors to join its aggregator app. The company, Clear Channel Communications, has already done deals with major broadcasters like Cumulus and Univision to bolster its app, iHeartRadio. On Tuesday, it announced that it would be adding streams from 106 stations controlled by two other major radio companies, the Cox Media Group and Emmis Communications.

Cox, which has 86 stations, and Emmis, which has 20, struck nonexclusive deals for iHeartRadio, which will allow their stations to keep streaming on TuneIn. CBS Radio, the second-largest broadcaster by revenue, streams its stations through TuneIn as well as its own Web sites and its own app, Radio.com.

For some broadcasters it may be too soon to tell which app — TuneIn or iHeartRadio — becomes dominant.

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