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This week I teamed up with an old colleague, Steve Buist of the Hamilton Spectator, to spend a half day or so with editorial staff from the Metroland West community newspapers at their annual Editorial Training Day.
Steve spent an hour and a half offering a highly personalized tour of the web tools he relies on for his – need I say it? – award-winning investigative reporting, with a focus on online court and government documents and databases. Steve has garnered multiple National Newspaper Awards and nominations for his work on topics like the food we eat (A Pig’s
Continue reading Going where your audience is (and newspapers mostly aren’t)
(cross-posted from Shift Lock, my column in The Publisher)
Imagine a simple, free, tool that lets ordinary people broadcast — instantly, to the entire wired world — what they had for lunch, which bus they’re waiting for, or how much they regret having chosen the purple sweater to go with the red skirt this morning. Imagine thousands — no, millions — of people picking up that tool and using it every single day. Welcome to Twitter. Twitter is a free, web-based “micro-blogging” tool that asks the question “What are you doing?” and then gives you just 140 characters (about the length of this sentence so far) to answer that question. Sign up and you can post your answers and read and follow anyone else’s on your computer, in your email, or sent as a text message to your cell phone. Here’s what someone named tresson posted literally 10 seconds ago:
“Just woke up, took my meds, and am listening to radio tiki.”
and five seconds after that, amid a torrent of similar ‘tweets’ I see this, from someone named philrandolph:
“Just finished Zach’s hockey practice, now on our way to church”
And on and on and on, an exhausting and inexhaustible raging river of mundanities; the Twitter army sends and receives millions of these missives every single day. I’ll bet many of you have never, or only recently, heard of Twitter (it’s two years old next month). And I bet most of you share the opinion expressed by one reporter who, when I introduced her to Twitter during a course and asked her what she thought of it, snarled, “I think some people need to get a life!” Wrong answer. Click to continue reading »
Last November, Steve Buttry, from the American Press Institute put out a call to his colleagues for advice on, as he put it, how to help an old stegasaurus upgrade his online skills. Steve, I hasten to add, wasn’t the old dinosaur in question, rather the request had arisen from one of his students. I reread what I had provided Steve and I think it’s some pretty fair advice for any journalist who’s looking to upgrade their skills, so I’m reprinting them here. But I urge you to visit Steve’s original post and take in
Continue reading Digital Survival Guide – Part 2
So Rob Curley has finally flopped moved on.(See update at end of post)One of online journalism’s undoubted stars — the driving force behind a crew that created the award-winning, high on cool and low to the ground sites like LJWorld.com and KUSports.com and the Naples Daily News site — has left LoudounExtra.com, which appears to be floundering. LoudounExtra was a model hyper-local news website template he was building for the Washington Post, but after about a year he and much of his team have decamped for … Las Vegas.Don’t get me wrong — I think Rob’s a brilliant
Continue reading Rob Curley’s crew flees suburbia for … Las Vegas
Good news: trends probably aren’t started by cool kids who are way smarter and more influential than you or I. Instead, products and ideas catch on in society because we’re ready for them – and just about anyone can start up the the wave of acceptance for that new idea. Some of the critical research on this was published back in Feb 2006 in Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, but most of us learned about it in a recent Fast Company piece by tech writer (and Canadian) Clive Thompson Is The Tipping
Continue reading “Most Read” stories may be a matter of luck, not quality as research discovers ‘hits’ are almost random
I’ve been thinking (and reading) a lot about crowdsourcing lately, partly because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that online news sites need to figure out how to open themselves (and the job of filtering information) to their community, but also because I’m suddenly teaching WebU’s crowdsourcing class. The course was created by Peter Organisciak, a Mac student (and by now probably grad – way to go Peter!) I hired to bring some needed technical expertise into our little "faculty". In Clay Shirkey’s SuperNova 2007 talk, he examined how the net’s communication tools meant that now "love" could be as strong
Continue reading Crowdsourcing a map of the universe
Another one of my favourite talks by noted Internet thinker and author Clay Shirky. I told you about his recent Web 2.0 talk comparing television sitcoms to gin, a stupifying social lubricant that’s helped us deal with wrenching social changes. Here’s another one of his talks, this one delivered as one of the opening keynotes at Supernova 2007. Using the repeated tearing down and rebuilding of a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine as a metaphor, Clay explained how the net’s social nature changes the basic dynamics of business and collective creativity, replacing the profit motive with something that looks
Continue reading More Clay Shirky: Is love stronger than profit?
Author and journalist programmer Clay Shirky gave a powerfully thoughtful talk at Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference last week: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. In his relaxed, 16 minute talk, Shirky drew up upon the thoughts of a British historian who theorized that the most significant technology of the early industrial revolution was gin, because it allowed the population to dull the pain and fear that accompanied the switch from agrarian to industrial society; dull it long enough for them to make the switch and then wake up to take advantage of the riches industrialization brought them –
Continue reading Gin, Television, and Social Surplus: Clay Shirky calls us out of our stupor
CurrentTV, Al Gore’ mixed cable/internet ‘news’ network that relies on user-generated content, is relaunching, Mashable.com reports , and moving their focus a bit away from video (they’re dropping the TV from their name) and into ways to share news, ideas, videos and commentary.
So now all users are invited to submit stories, links and videos. This looks somewhat like a social bookmarking site, and as users can vote on content it’s a bit of a Digg approach as well. The number of votes is not displayed, however. Just the percentage of votes that are moving
Continue reading CurrentTV dropping the “TV” moving to a mixed social/edited news and comment aggregator
Yeah, yeah, we all know newspaper classifieds are under direct attack from sites like Craigslist and Kijiji and even Facebook’s Marketplace, but the reality is that classified ads are such a clear winner in the race to monetize the web (there, I said it, now I promise not to use the term for the rest of the year) that many, many people are trying to innovate in that space, trying to come up with the next ebay or …. well, Craigslist.What many of these innovators have in common is their efforts to harness the power
Continue reading New ways of selling ads stress the social side of the web
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