Dec 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Just came across something interesting from a few days ago that I somehow missed, but which could have serious implications for newspapers and their evolving relationship with Google: Search Engine Journal notes that Google News is tinkering with its algorithm and the way it ranks news stories. It wants to do a number of things, but one of the main ones is to promote the publication that first breaks a news story, rather than one of the follow-up pieces from newswires or larger papers.
That’s good for smaller local papers, since they will get more exposure and hence more traffic. It doesn’t say so in the Google News blog post, but I have to wonder if this is related to some of the criticism that Google got after they did the deal with Associated Press to host AP stories on Google servers and some people complained that local publications weren’t getting credit from Google News for the stories they were breaking.
Oct 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Thanks to my mesh pal Mike Masnick from Techdirt for pointing me towards a recent column by Jeremy Wagstaff of Loose Wire (and the Wall Street Journal) that I had been meaning to post about. In the column, entitled “The Future of News,” Jeremy writes about how it’s difficult to talk about the future of news without admitting that the idea of what we call “news” has changed, and is continuing to change. As he puts its:
“There is no news. Or at least there is no longer a traditional, established and establishment definition of what is news.
Instead we have information. Some of it moving very fast, so it looks like news.”
This is partly the result of technology, in that more and more people are connected to sources of information than they used to be, even if those sources of information are friends or family on the other end of a cellphone or an MSN conversation, or a news feed. But all those connections have also expanded the definition of news:
“True, if someone hits a tall building with an airliner, that’s news to all of us. The U.S. invades or leaves Iraq; that’s news. But the rest of the time, news is a slippery beast that means different things to different people.”
And as newspapers and media websites everywhere are discovering, the news — the stuff people are really interested in — isn’t always what we put on the front page, or even the second or third page. Sometimes it’s the quirky or human-interest stories that really grab people. And yet, we routinely denigrate those types of stories.
“What we’re seeing with the Internet is not a revolution against the values of old media; a revolution against the notion that it’s only us who can dictate what is news.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Read the whole column here.
Jul 5th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Shane Richmond, who is one of the masterminds behind the Telegraph’s community efforts and most recently the launch of its MyTelegraph venture — which includes blogs and profile pages for readers — has an update on how the project is going. Among other things, he says that about 4,500 people have signed up and have written thousands of blog posts, some of which — including one on the recent attempted terrorist attacks in London — have been excerpted in the newspaper. The Telegraph has also changed its comment system so that only registered readers can comment (the same system the Globe and Mail uses).
Jul 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Matt McAlister has a great post up about the idea of media as a platform, which I encourage anyone interested in the future of media online to read. He says that in his view it isn’t really about “openness” or “walled gardens” and other popular metaphors:
It’s not about stopping bad behavior or even embracing good behavior. It’s about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for an entire ecosystem. If you do it right, you will watch network effects take hold naturally. And then everyone wins.
McAlister says that the most successful media platforms, broadly speaking, are those that give their users the power to impact the experience for themselves and to improve the total experience for everyone as they use it.
“When you look around the Internet media landscape today you see a lot of successful companies that either consciously or subconsciously understand how to make media work as a platform.
MySpace created a fantastic expression platform, though perhaps unwittingly. Wikipedia evolved quickly into a massive research platform. Flickr and del.icio.us, of course, get the network effects inherent in sharing information…photos and links, respectively.
Washingtonpost and BBC Backstage are moving toward national political information platforms.”
There are lots of other good examples and smart thoughts from Matt. Go on and read the whole thing. I’ll wait 
Jul 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Jack Shafer of Slate.com, a veteran journalist and all-around smart guy, has a great piece in which he looks at what newspapers were like decades ago — in terms of size, coverage, layout and staffing levels — and asks the provocative question: After the staff cuts, will the newspapers of the future look like the newspapers of the past? What you think of the answer may depend on whether you work at a newspaper or not:
“By my personal measure, the national and foreign news published in the summer of 1972 by the Times and Post matches the current product, even though it is less “featurey.”
That both papers did fine work with half the current manpower should encourage serious readers—even though it may depress journalists.”
(Thanks to Rob for the link)
