If you are heading into 2008 thinking, we must do more with social media, here is a useful primer to social news websites. From the post: Social news websites generally operate via a wisdom of the crowds principle; groups of individuals with different points of views are able to collectively determine the value or importance of content disseminated through the community. The users are given the editorial power to influence
PDF The BBC’s Nick Reynolds, currently working on guidelines for personal blogs of staffers, offers an insight into the skirmishes with the Biased BBC blog. Biased BBC is the bane of many editors as it regularly criticises the Beeb, accusing it of all sorts of bias. The article was published in the BBC’s inhouse magazine, Ariel, but Nick has posted the more than 1,000 words on his blog. He urges the
The first ONA panel on day 2 is about how to manage a newsroom in the 21st century. Despite starting at 8.30am, the session is pretty packed. This is understandable, as just about every newsroom is struggling to bridge the cultural differences between print, broadcast and online. Jim Brady from the WashingtonPost.com admitted that managing the relationship with the print side was still the biggest challenge he was dealing with.
The Future of Newspapers conference is taking place in Cardiff over the next couple of days. It started with a keynote by former Guardian editor Peter Preston, which is available in video. Unfortunately the rest of the conference isn’t being webcast. Looking around the web, there seems to be little coverage of the first day’s events. Paul Bradshaw is Twittering the conference, but 140-character summaries of 8,000 word research papers
The head of the press watchdog in the UK has come up with an odd way to deal with the issue of trust online. Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has called for a digital kitemark for news sites, because there is a “crying need to be able to distinguish between what is rubbish and what is quality, between what is fantasy and what reliable”. Sir
If you have ever wondered how news consumption compares around the world, this collection of charts by Akamai provides a useful guide. The Net Usage Index for News shows how many news webpages are being viewed around the world, drawing on data from big news providers such as the BBC, Reuters, NBC, El Pais and Le Monde. Akamai has also created widgets for PC and Macs so that you can
The Vancouver-based “citizen journalism” site, NowPublic, has attracted US$10.6m from a range of venture capital firms. According to co-founder and CEO Leonard Brody, large media companies were interested in buying up NowPublic, but the company decided to stay independent. The influx of cash can be seen as a vote of confidence in the site, coming after the demise of similar sites such as Backfence and Bayosphere. By comparison, NowPublic has
It has been a bad couple of days for the BBC, with its admission that several phone-in competitions were faked. The response in the press has been outrage, with headlines such as “They’re bear faced cheats” in The Sun, or The Daily Mail talking about “The shaming of the BBC“. There is no doubt that this is a serious issue and BBC producers were wrong to have deceived audiences. But
If you are in the news business, be prepared to spend, spend, spend in digital media before making any money. At least that’s the view of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. Appearing before a UK parliamentary committee into media ownership, he gave this assessment of the future: For at least ten years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant
The idea of a personalised new service has been long debated by journalists. A newspaper is built on the notion of providing a generic news package, whereas the web offers the ability to create what Nicholas Negroponte called “The Daily Me“. News organisations have different appoaches to the concept of a virtual daily newspaper customized for the individual tastes. Yahoo and Google both hand over a significant amount of editorial