Here’s something for a holiday Easter weekend. A wonderful cartoon by Rob Cottingham on how to explain the internet. Noise to Signal Cartoon Print
PDF Canadians love the internet. That’s the conclusion of a study that found that Canadians value their home Internet connection more than any other medium An online survey of 1,682 adults, conducted by the Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC )and Vision Critical, showed that 42% of respondents say they would be “least willing to give up” their home internet connection. Some 24% said they would be least willing to give up their television cable subscription,
An interesting project that seeks to help journalists and editors connect with each other has just launched in Canada. MediaCooler.com is the brainchild of my friend, Alison Yesilcimen. I’ve been following the development of the service since September last year. I’ve had long conversations with Alison about it, providing feedback and trying out the alpha site. MediaCooler aims to be a marketplace for media. In an e-mail, Alison said that she “always
Jim Brady, former editor of TBD.com and WashingtonPost.com, set the tone for a professional panel on engaging the audience at #ISOJ by saying they were going to stick to time and leave plenty of time for questions. First up was Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of VG Multimedia, Norway. He started by stating that he tells his journalists to spend a minimum of 10% of time interacting and engaging with readers. Three-quarters of
The research presented at ISOJ by Jonathan Groves, Drury University and Carrie Brown, University of Memphis, looked at the Christian Science Monitor’s transition from print to web. For the paper (PDF), the researchers spend three weeks in the newsroom, watching how the journalists worked and talking to them about the journalism. The Monitor started in 1908 as a daily newspaper distributed by mail and switched to web-only daily in March 2009, with a
The first research paper at ISOJ from Tanja Aitamurto, University of Tampere, Finland, and Seth Lewis, University of Minnesota, looked at processes of innovation (PDF). Presenting the paper, Lewis highlighted the challenge facing news organisations today: keeping up with modern demands for R&D while finding new sources of revenue. He said media organisations have under invested in R&D and not expressed much interest in open innovation. The paper looked at NPR, the
John Kilpatrick, vice president of design for The Daily, provided an inside look into the new iPad app at the ISOJ. The Daily is a custom application with a custom content management system that was built from the ground up for product. The idea is to be able to create custom experiences everyday, exploring what works and what doesn’t work, he said. Kilpatrick explained that the experience of news on a
A timely start to the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin with Vivian Schiller, ex-president/CEO of NPR. While quoting some of the bad news in the annual State of the Media report for 2011, Schiller outlined seven reasons to be cheerful: Conditions finally right to give paywalls a fair shake. What has changed, she said is that while scale still matters, brand is back. The other thing is that you
Innovation has become something of a buzz word in journalism. Usually the focus on innovation is on developing new products or services. While it is important to figure out how to create and provide journalism in new ways, the real key to innovation lies in the way we think of journalism. The challenge here isn’t a lack of new ‘innovative’ products; it is adopting what is often called a digital mindset.
In class this week, we looked at collaborative story-telling through social media, using the Storify platform to look at different aspects of the situation in Libya. Storify that makes it easy to add content from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media sites to a story with a simple “drop and drag” function. The platform highlights what I have called ambient journalism. In a couple of papers published last year, I argued that: Journalism,