Study: Online news use grows
February 28, 2005
A rapidly growing number of Americans are increasing their use of online sources for news and information at the expense of other media , according to a national segmentation study conducted by washingtonpost.com in partnership with Nielsen//NetRatings and Scarborough….
Build your own news site
February 28, 2005
Portals such as Yahoo and MSN have recently discovered the power of RSS. Here’s a look at how both My Yahoo! and My MSN have improved their services dramatically by incorporating RSS and expanding the choices of content you can add to the pages.
The Observer Blog
February 27, 2005
The world’s oldest Sunday paper, The Observer, has launched a blog that should lend ideas to newspaper blogs everywhere. So many papers have blogs now, what’s so special about this one? It includes podcasts, mobile posts, Del.icio.us links and a tagging system The Observer calls “The Folksonomic Zeitgeist.”
“Every one of our weblog posts has been categorised by the writer in two different ways. First, the post is linked to the section of the newspaper that it relates to. The front page of the weblog has links to the archives of these sections. This is simple. The second way, however, is more involved. The writer adds keywords to each post to more finely describe the subject matter. These are called ‘tags’. The folksonomic zeitgeist shows the tags that have been used over the past seven days, sized in relation to the amount they have been used. This way you can see the subjects that have been on our mind the most over the past week.”
The blog also includes entries from the Observer editor about the making of the daily paper that create a new level of transparency.
(The Observer is the Sunday paper of The Guardian, which has long been an online leader when it comes to Weblogs)
Interactive Oscars multimedia
February 27, 2005
Don’t miss these:
USAToday.com interactive: Oscar yearbook, ballot, fashion quiz, red carpet gallery and even Oscar bingo.
The Critics’ Ballots: A. O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden pick who will win, who ought to win and who was robbed at this year’s Oscars in this The New York Times audio slide show.
MSNBC.com’s The Big Picture: Rate the stars, build a biopic and place your bets.
Write your own acceptance speech: from the Los Angeles Times.
Defamer.com fills LA gossip void
February 27, 2005
With an absence of local gossip in print in Los Angeles, Gawker Media’s Defamer.com is leading “an online gossip boomlet,” The New York Times reports. The site had already had more than 3 million page views in February through Thursday, and 2.5 million in January, by its own count.
“The Internet is doing what the real tabloids did in the 30’s and 40’s,” said Neal Gabler, author of “Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity.”
“The Internet is one of the great forces of empowerment,” he added. “It can’t be co-opted.”
New York Post weighs IntelliTxt
February 24, 2005
Two months after Forbes.com stopping using IntelliTxt to link words in news stories to ads, The New York Post is experimenting with the technology on its news site. The Post hasn’t decided whether to use it yet, but the experiment with the technology became public after a test accidentally showed up on the site.
Vibrant Media’s controversial IntelliTxt technology puts double blue underlines on paid hyperlinks and pops up ad text when users hover over them. The company says about 400 online publishers now use the technology, but major publishers have avoided it.
‘Today’s Blogs’
February 24, 2005
Modeled on its popular “Today’s Paper’s” feature that summarizes the front pages of the largest newspapers, Slate has launched a “Today’s Blogs” feature summarizing “the latest chatter in cyberspace.”
What works and what doesn’t in washingtonpost.com’s new design
February 24, 2005
Greg Edwards of Eyetools Research did a fascinating heatmap of a group of 19 new visitors viewing washingtonpost.com’s new front page to see what can be learned from its design.
He concluded that the main content area in the top half of the page has a good readable design. “It is heavily viewed and read (more so than some other news sites). Good use of line-spacing and white-space. People even scroll. Job well done!”
He also found that the bottom half of the page has ineffective line-height spacing and lack of white-space reduce reading. Most of the content is being missed and there is no consistent guidance of eyes to section headings. Opportunities to communicate value to visitors is greatly reduced in this area. We’ve seen other websites do a better job.”
You can see the heat map here.
Emerging technology video
February 24, 2005
Video recently posted on The Media Center site includes clips from talks from a recent “Emerging Technology” seminar by Dan Gillmor and by the very entertaining Tim Barsky, an Ashkenazi storyteller who blends hip-hop street theatre, and Jewish folklore.
Other clips include:
Mark Fletcher, CEO and Founder of Bloglines, on RSS; Salim Ismail, Co-Founder & CEO of PubSub Concepts, Inc., on being able to search the future; Katherine von Jan, Trend Director of Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve, on “brailing the culture”; and Kevin Bankston, an Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on how easy it is for the government to find out what Web users are viewing and why media companies need to be concerned.
Readers on teaching digital journalism
February 24, 2005
CyberJournalist.net readers have offered up some good suggestions on what topics should be covered when teaching digital journalism. Take a look and add your thoughts.