The Next Newsroom Project

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

Using Technology for Community Building – Webinar Hosted by Grassroots Grantmakers | E-Democracy.Org – Project Blog

Hacks/Hackers and Mozilla want to know: How should we structure an online curriculum for journalists and technologists to learn together? – help.hackshackers.com

Hacks/Hackers ask: “How should we structure an online curriculum for journalists and technologists to learn together?”

Notes on Wikileaks « 6 to cut, 4 to sharpen

He writes: “Julian’s point, which I agree with, is often that newspapers are failing because of bad journalism. How many stories has Wikileaks broken vs the Times. Or the Guardian. Combined. And as budget cuts increase, it allows for good journalism to emerge from Global Voices and other interesting new projects.”

New York Times Strikes Back at WikiLeaks Founder – Beltway Beast – The Daily Beast

I guess the warm fuzzies between WikiLeaks and the mainstream orgs they worked with are gone.

Time Inc. Frustrated by Apple Over iPad Subscription Issue | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Peter Kafka writes: “Time Inc. likes to show off its iPad apps as a symbol of the company’s future. But inside the publisher, the digital editions have become a source of hair-pulling frustration.

That’s because the magazine giant has been unable to get Apple to let it sell and manage subscriptions for its iPad apps–much to Time Inc.’s surprise.”

I Need a Great Story: About

Founders write: “iNeedaGreatStory.com™ is a new destination for anyone seeking the perfect stories, infographics and videos for their websites, publications and newsletters.”

Story Lab – Sniffing out Washington stories in a coffee house

Marc Fisher writes: “There’s a truism in journalism that says stories are everywhere, that every person contains the material for a story that can reveal to readers some essential truth about who we are and the pressing questions of our time.”

There’s a truism in journalism that says stories are everywhere, that every person contains the material for a story that can reveal to readers some essential truth about who we are and the pressing questions of our time.

Facebook launches a “Facebook + Media” page » Nieman Journalism Lab

Megan Garber writes: “Facebook + Media is an indication of the collapse of the wall that used to divide content and delivery platform.”

When do 92,000 documents trump an off-the-record dinner? A few more thoughts about Wikileaks » Nieman Journalism Lab

C.W. Anderson writes: “And this gets me excited because I think it represents something new in journalism, or something old-enough-to-new: a focus on the aggregation of a million “on the ground reports” that might sometimes get us closer to the truth than three well placed sources over a nice off-the-record dinner.”

WikiLeaks Data on Afghanistan Deaths Visualized – Science and Tech – The Atlantic – StumbleUpon

A few years ago, the Washington Post embraced the strategy of having separate digital and print newsrooms. But in recent years, it has gradually merged them back to together.

The impact of that decision was noted this week after the Post published a two-year investigation called “Top Secret America.” The series examines the enormous growth of secretive American agencies since Sept. 11.

This weekend, On The Media host Brooke Gladstone interviewed one of the journalists involved, William M. Arkin.

At one point, after discussing the newsroom merger, Gladstone asked: “Do you think it would have been possible to assemble and present this volume of data before these online tools were available?”

Arkin replied:

“You know, it couldn’t have been done without the digital side. And in the time period that The Washington Post supported this two-year project, Brooke, they consolidated the digital and print newsrooms.

So now all of the people who work at The Washington Post, both online and on paper, work in the same building, on the same newsroom, in the same floor. And I think that this is the product of what that consolidation has meant, and I think it’s a pointer of what’s possible when one conceives of a project digitally from the beginning.”

You can listen to the segment here:

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange : The New Yorker

Just last month, The New Yorker profiled WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

PressThink: The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World’s First Stateless News Organization

Jay Rosen writes: “In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.”

“In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.”

Design Agitator: An Experimental Honor

WNYC’s John Keefe explains “The Takeaway” project which recently won a J-Lab award.

That the award effectively predates those happenings is a huge jolt of support for experimentation, design thinking in journalism and everyone who contributed to this unique collaboration.

robcurley.com » Snapshot from the Las Vegas Sun’s multimedia newsroom

Curly writes: “But the real reason I wanted to post something today was because there were a couple of really fantastic examples Thursday that show how the Sun’s newsroom works on a couple of very different daily stories.”

What if there are no secrets? « BuzzMachine

@JeffJarvis says: Is no secret safe? That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked.

In Disclosing Secret Documents, WikiLeaks Seeks ‘Transparency’ – NYTimes.com

An interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Kabul War Diary

This is the official WikiLeaks page, which was actually hard to find given the traffic overload they’re experiencing.

The War Logs – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com

Today, the conversation is all about WikiLeaks and their massive document dump on the Aghan War.

Cassidy: Silicon Valley Moms Blog turns out the lights – SiliconValley.com

The death of a popular blogging network has left many mystified. Problem: Lots of traffic, but not enough revenue.

INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS TO BE PRESENTED AT THE WORLD EDITORS FORUM IN HAMBURG

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

MediaShift . Writers Talk About Working the Hyper-Local Beat | PBS

Missouri School of Journalism: Citizen Journalism vs. Legacy News: The Battle for News Supremacy

Sure to generate lots of heat. But having a hard time finding the underlying study.

Yahoo! Media Chief Says Content Farms Won’t Kill Journalism As We Know It « The Biz Blog – Forbes.com

Maybe not kill it, but leave it deformed or seriously wounded. This issue is bad for the Web, not just journalism.

A few days ago on the Journalism That Matters email list, someone posted a note that Blognetnews.com, a news aggregation service of some kind, had gone under, probably due to lack of advertising revenue. I had never heard of Blognetnews.com, let alone read it. Someone asked whether any aggregators were making money.

My guess: No. Or not much. For all the energy being poured into creating different aggregation services, I firmly believe there is no business there. There are three reasons for this.

First, whenever you convene a bunch of engineers to talk about the future of news, they inevitably want to focus on the issues of aggregation and personalization. The premise here is that there is a massive problem plaguing people on the Web. Namely, there is so much content being created every day (6 billion pages is a figure that gets tossed around a lot, but I’ve never seen that confirmed) and that people are drowning and need help finding the best stuff.

The thing is, I think this is mainly a problem for a handful of news nerds (like me) and Silicon Valley insiders. But beyond that, most people aren’t really that worried about it. They just don’t care that much. They don’t have the capacity to read much more than they read now. This means that the market for such aggregation services is much smaller than is typically assumed.

Second, factor in that the cost of starting these types of services, which has fallen dramatically over the past decade. Any decent programmer can throw these together and push them out. So there are way too many of these services, slicing the potential market into even smaller chunks that each will have trouble generating enough audience.

Third, in terms of finding stuff, the bulk of people are still fairly passive in their consumption habits, despite the way the Web has created avenues for greater participation. They’re content with what they’re getting through their Facebook and Twitter streams, or catching the top headlines from Yahoo News. There’s a reason that Yahoo News is still far larger than Google News. Most people don’t want to do the work of assembling their news, creating context, building a profile, re-finding their friends through another service.

The harder challenge is finding new ways to create quality, relevant information that expands the universe of news that people can consume. And then packaging that in a way that fits the way people want to consume it, when they’re ready to consume it.

As an aside, I do think that aggregation as a feature on news sites is helpful and appreciated. And the same with posting links to your followers on Facebook and Twitter. But finding new ways to re-package over and over the same stuff floating on the Web just doesn’t address a burning problem in most people’s daily lives. And failing that test, it doesn’t make much sense as a standalone business.

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

An Ethical Argument for Transparency – Part II « DigiDave

Ethan Zuckerman: Listening to global voices | Video on TED.com

Zuckerman challenges the notion that the Web is bringing us together. He looks at the way we flock with similar groups and how to bridge those divides.

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks | Video on TED.com

Are Hyperlocals Replacing Traditional Newspapers? – TIME

Small business and startups: engage your customers the old(spice)-fashioned way « crowdSPRING Blog

With Sacramento Connect, The Bee taps the power of partnerships | Knight Digital Media Center

Congrats to Melanie Sill and her team on this. It’s an opportunity for all newspapers to extend themselves into a network and regional platform.

Google takes the FTC to school « BuzzMachine

Ushahidi, Twitter, and the future of foreign aid

Ushahidi is an open source platform, developed in the global south. Ten years ago, Africa didn’t have the connectivity to develop and distribute a platform like Ushahidi. And ten years ago, cell phones didn’t have the power or the ubiquity to make Ushahidi a useful tool.

Digital Journalist Survival Guide: A Glossary of Tech Terms You Should Know

The days are over when a journalist could ignore those geeks in the corner who typed lines of code, worked on the website and spoke in a bizarre language populated with acronyms. Any journalist’s story now may be distributed with an API; information gathered by a reporter could be used in a mashup or shared via Scribd.

Public Media Joins Forces for One Big Platform

CPB is pushing, and funding, a common API to pull content from across public media. A good thing, I’d say.

Vivian Schiller: “Say there’s a blogger who is particularly focused on the BP crisis in the Gulf — they will be able to pull out still photographs, national and international reporting, reporting from local stations, video from PBS, data, and mash that all up together.”

All the buzz around Silicon Valley this week is about the launch of a new iPad app called Flipboard, which brings together social streams and aggregation into a new mix of some kind.

Robert Scoble kicked off the hype earlier this week with his review. But when the app debuted, the demand apparently melted the company’s servers.

Since I don’t yet have an iPad, I’m relying on others for the description and reaction. Did you get it? If so, post your thoughts in the comments below.

And in the meantime, here’s the official Flipboard video that explains what the hype is all about:

Of course, the answer is no, far from it. But last week, On The Media devoted its entire show to examining different aspects related to the future of newspapers. Much of this represented well covered ground, so for those of you involved in this discussion for a long time, there may not be much new here.

However, there were a couple of interesting segments that I’d recommend. The first is Google’s Quest To Save Newspapers, an interview with The Atlantic’s James Fallows. He points to two reasons Google is trying to help newspapers:

“A low-road reason, which they admit but don’t stress, and a high-road reason. The low-road reason is something Eric Schmidt, the CEO and – full disclosure – a longtime friend of mine, he said that Google could not afford to be seen as the vulture picking off the dead carcass of the news industry.

The high-road reason that I was – initially I thought was just kind of blather but I became more persuaded of, is that they think that it is in their interest as providers and indexers of information online. If that information becomes polluted, bad, junky, people are going to have less reason to turn to them.”

The full segment is here:

The other segment worth a listen is the interview with Yochai Benkler, who gives a well-reasoned look at the current transition and some reasons for optimism as host Brooke Gladstone explains:

“And he applauds the transition to a mixed system in which concerned citizens combine their time and expertise with professionals to unearth and disseminate important information. It’s already happening, he notes. A patron-funded independent investigative newsroom called ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize this year for its coverage of a New Orleans hospital making life and death decisions during Katrina.”

Though I’m not sure that I really buy the idea that ProPublica is really all that new when it comes to news models. Yes, it’s non-profit. But basically it’s a newsroom of professional journalists doing investigative reporting, though funded by a wealthy patron rather than ads. But still, it doesn’t look like the revolution to me in terms of how news is gathered or distributed.

That segment is here:

The Google News blog posted a video of Krishna Bharat being interviewed at Stanford University last month. The folks at The Next Web Google offer a good breakdown here. Among their highlights:

Bharat is convinced professional journalism is here to stay and while understandably unsure as to how things will develop, he briefly lists a number of points he believes will take shape over the course of the next few years. FYI none involves the death of professional journalism, or paying for it either for that matter.

Here’s the video: