the Digital-Only Paywall Parade

You’ll be hard-pressed to find many daily newspapers in the U.S., Canada, Scandinavia, or Germany that won’t be charging something for digital access by the time 2015 rolls around.

Read more at Newsonomics

The Future of Video Journalism

The use of an Instagram exposure on the cover of Time tells us volumes about not only where the photography business is going, but where the video business is sure to follow. How long will it be before iPhone videos replace the work of video professionals at TV's highest levels? I guess five years. Maybe fewer.

Read more at the Huffington Post

Your [Choose Your Expletive] Ad Here

There are two main reasons, experts say, for the increasing frankness of the language in everyday advertising. One reason is that it reflects the increasing frankness of the American vernacular, as evidenced by the swear words that are uttered by characters in television series and that appear on the covers of mainstream magazines.

The other reason for the trend is the greater efforts being made by marketers to appeal to the younger consumers, in their 20s and 30s, who are known as millennials or Generation Y. Because those consumers are generally more accepting of such language than their parents or grandparents, marketers say they believe that including those words will help the ads appeal to the target audience.

Read more here

Tracking children has never been easier

An early offering, in 2003, was Wherify, a tracking device which locks to a child’s wrist. Devices invented since then protect autistic children, who easily get lost, or into danger. Youngsters on Canadian farms wear radio tags on bracelets to signal their proximity to adults operating heavy machinery.

Longer battery life and miniaturisation are making tracking cheaper and more practical. The easiest way is to use smartphones. Many mobile operators offer child-tracking at extra cost, but the number of free tracking applications is growing fast. These services and devices can provide children’s location, or send alerts about their behaviour: when they return home, or stray beyond an agreed boundary, or go out late. Speed detection reveals when somebody is in a vehicle—and whether it is breaking the speed limit.

Critics say tracking does not really protect children. Savvy kidnappers will dispose of phones or other devices (implantable tracking chips are, so far, the stuff of spy movies only). And strangers rarely attack children anyway: parents are the most likely murderers, and accidents are a far graver danger than assault. “Location tracking won’t stop your child falling into a river,” says Anne-Marie Oostveen, who studies surveillance at Oxford University. For fretful parents the new devices may just mean still more grounds for worry.

Read more at The Economist

Latest FCC Statistics Show Increase in Number of Licensed Radio Stations in 2012

Based on FCC statistics through December 30, 2012, the number of licensed broadcast radio stations is still on the rise, continuing the trend that we’ve seen every quarter this year. Based on this list, there are more radio stations today (15,196) then there were at the end of September, 2012 (15,128).

Read more at Radio Survivor

Those damn copy editors

Think of a copy editor as a parent trying to clean up a teenager's room. You open the door and, God above, there are discarded articles of clothing on every surface. You start to dig in and discover dirty plates, some with unconsumed food on them; notes and uncompleted homework assignments; still more malodorous articles of clothing, along with the unspeakable sheets; and, under the bed, dust bunnies the size of tumbleweeds.

The blunt truth is that most people, and that can include many academics, are not very good writers. Their prose needs the basic cleaning up, but it also needs the clarification, the sharpening and pruning. The sad truth is that many professional writers are not particularly good at it either, and I can speak from the experience of one who has dealt with the prose of hundreds of professional journalists. As my former colleague Rafael Alvarez once said after a stint on the metro desk, "Reading other people's raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked."

Read more at the Baltimore Sun

Key Academic Research Resources

A key skill is the ability to locate and review academic studies to strengthen and deepen stories. One common search strategy for finding academic research is trying a series of keywords in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. That general method may fail if you’re trying to find cutting-edge research findings on policy or news-related issues. While no particular strategy is perfect, establishing a checklist of key databases is essential. Your selection of databases may ultimately need to be tailored and subject-specific, but it helps to have familiarity with a basic, multidisciplinary set of research tools — a “go-to” set of databases. Using your keywords systematically through a series of databases can diversify your search and allow you to locate most of the best available research.

Read more at Journalists' Resources

10 things every journalist should know in 2013

Here are 10 things every journalists should know in 2013.

1. It's all about skills, skills, skills

Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news at the New York Times, has one piece of advice for journalists wanting to get ahead: "Skills, skills, skills, skills, skills, skills."

"Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, it is just not enough any more to just be able to turn a phrase, or do the traditional kinds of reporting," he told Journalism.co.uk. "You need to be a little bit of a jack of all trades; you need to be able to shoot and cut video or do audio or code or do data analysis," he said.

"And it's even more important now than it ever has been in this shrinking industry to have those kinds of skills."

Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News online, agrees. He looks for those with skills in social media, data journalism and with "an ability to appreciate the importance of still pictures, of video, graphics and audio in communicating and telling stories".

"It's not necessarily being expert in all of those things," Herrmann said, "but being aware of their importance and appreciating when they can be really effective and have impact."

9. Online journalism is mobile first

Mobile is an important traffic driver for news sites, we are regularly reminded. At particular times of the day the Guardian's mobile traffic exceeds desktop traffic; on an average weekday 24 per cent of readers of BBC News access via mobile, with that rising to a record of 30 per cent on the day of the US election last November, the BBC Editors' blog reported. And more than a third of New York Times traffic now comes from phones and tablets, according to this post by Martin Belam.

But while some sites have a mobile first strategy when thinking about how to present data visualisations, features and multimedia, many journalists have desktop in mind when creating the story.

In a presentation at December's news:rewired digital journalism conference, Belam said: "Think reader before editor. Think software before content. Think simplicity before features. Think mobile before desktop."

Read more here

What The Tech World Looks Like To A Teen

Instagram

Looking at her Instagram feed, I noticed that the vast majority of photos were of people – not beautiful views, objects, or experiences. This is in stark contrast to what the people I follow on Instagram take photos of, and very analogous to the photos that appear in my Facebook Newsfeed.

My takeaway: Facebook was smart to buy Instagram.
Facebook

She mentioned that she tries to visit Facebook as infrequently as possible. “It’s addicting,” she bemoaned, “you end up getting lost in it and I don’t like that.” I found this perspective interesting. Facebook is clearly doing a good job delivering relevant content, yet its users (at least this one) feel poorly when they use the service. Related, she mentioned that she only visits Facebook after her Instagram Feed updates have been exhausted.

My takeaway: Facebook may have an irreversibly bad brand.


Read more at BuzzFeed

Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition

It was the bold title of a conference this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and of a widely read article in The Harvard Business Review last October: “Big Data: The Management Revolution.” At the M.I.T. conference, a panel was asked to cite examples of big failures in Big Data. No one could really think of any. Soon after, though, Roberto Rigobon could barely contain himself as he took to the stage. Mr. Rigobon, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, said that the financial crisis certainly humbled the data hounds. “Hedge funds failed all over the world,” he said. The problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modeling came out of the sciences, where the behavior of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics. In so many Big Data applications, a math model attaches a crisp number to human behavior, interests and preferences. The peril of that approach, as in finance, was the subject of a recent book by Emanuel Derman, a former quant at Goldman Sachs and now a professor at Columbia University. Its title is “Models. Behaving. Badly.”

Claudia Perlich, chief scientist at Media6Degrees, an online ad-targeting start-up in New York, puts the problem this way: “You can fool yourself with data like you can’t with anything else. I fear a Big Data bubble.” She is worried about a rush of people calling themselves “data scientists,” doing poor work and giving the field a bad name. Indeed, Big Data does seem to be facing a work-force bottleneck. “We can’t grow the skills fast enough,” says Ms. Perlich.

“Models do not just predict, but they can make things happen. That’s not discussed generally in our field.” Models can create what data scientists call a behavioral loop. A person feeds in data, which is collected by an algorithm that then presents the user with choices, thus steering behavior.

Personally, my bigger concern is that the algorithms that are shaping my digital world are too simple-minded, rather than too smart.

Read more at the New York Times

What is Big Data? Research roundup, reading list

Data can be text and numbers but can also include maps and images. An array of machines — from underwater sensors and pet collars to mobile phones and traffic signals — can capture reams of data waiting to be sliced, diced and analyzed. In recent years, technological advances have expanded the types of Big Data that can be harnessed and stored — and who has access to these data.

Proponents see it as enabling new businesses and promoting transparency in markets and government. Detractors fear that this transparency will extend into the personal realm, as was the case when Target’s data crunchers correctly determined from shopping patterns that a teenager was pregnant before she had disclosed her condition to family members — or the store.

Big Data involves not only individuals’ digital footprints (data they themselves leave behind) but, perhaps more importantly, also individuals’ data shadows (information about them generated by others).

Read more at Journalists  Resources

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