The Next Newsroom Project

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

MediaShift . While Others Shrink, KQED Expands Cross-Platform News | PBS

Katie Donnelly writes: “Last month, KQED News in San Francisco dramatically expanded the scope of its news coverage with a new website, an increase from six to 16 local radio newscasts and the addition of eight news staffers, including six producers/reporters, a developer and a social media specialist. Its expansion will continue over the next several months (look for a new news blog in the next couple of months).”

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Yahoo readies San Francisco news site

Alan Mutter writes: “Though hundreds of news shops of every shape and size already cover Northern California, Yahoo will be an instantly formidable competitor because of its vast market reach.”

InvestigateWest: Lessons from the first year | Knight Digital Media Center

Rita Hibbard writes: “Doing good work isn’t enough to save journalism. Fighting to preserve the legacy isn’t the place you want to be. I knew that going into the launch of InvestigateWest just over a year ago, hard lessons learned living through the closure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a newspaper with a long history of strong local coverage and investigative journalism.”

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Flagship newspapers wane in audience mix

Alan Mutter writes: “The flagship newspaper produces barely half of the weekday audience delivered by some major metro publishers, according to an analysis of data recently issued by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.”

COFFEE, BARS AND NEWSPAPERS

@giner writes: “Coffee, Bars and Newspapers. Not a bad cocktail. From readers to audiences and communities. Do you know any newspapers running coffees or bars?”

Research shows Twitter’s value in questioning rumors « The Buttry Diary

Steve Buttry writes: “If you listen to and read the Twitter haters, you also hear that Twitter is a place where false rumors spread rapidly. My reply to that is that Twitter is a form of communication, and rumors spread on all forms of communication.”

How Technology Is Renewing Attention to Long-form Journalism

Mallary Jean Tenore writes: “Five guys — Nate Weiner of Read It Later, Marco Arment of Instapaper, Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer of Longform.org, and Mark Armstrong of @LongReads — have found ways to use Web tools to renew attention to long-form journalism, increase its shelf life and make it easier for people to consume and share it.”

Structured news: Make useful connections to build your news business | Knight Digital Media Center

Amy Gahran writes: “Stories are the most common way to package news. But despite how well the narrative story format works with the human brain, it’s generally not the best way to ensure that information and context get discovered online. To a large extent, news stories trap the value of information like a fly in amber.”

PJNet – Blog – Patch.com seeks dozens of Atlanta metro journalists

Len Witt writes: “Patch.com, the hyperlocal journalism start-up on which AOL is betting $50 million dollars, is searching for several dozen journalists to edit and run local community sites throughout the Atlanta metro area. The pay is between $35,000 — $45,000 a year plus benefits. It comes with a freelance budget too.”

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

MediaShift Idea Lab . How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference | PBS

Harry Dugmore wrote: “Can democracy work and good government happen without local media?”

Choose Your Multimedia Tools Strategically: Story is Still King

Marc Cooper writes: “Choosing the right tool to tell the right story is one of the greatest challenges we faced during this summer’s round of Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowships at USC Annenberg. Our mandate, like that of any cutting-edge news crew, was to at once tell the most in-depth stories while being as innovative as possible. But sometimes these two principles can pull against each other.”

Four ways to use Fast Follow – Twitter Media

If you haven’t been reading Twitter’s media blog, you definitely should. This post supplies four tips your newsroom could start using today.

Digital Magazines Could Give Industry a Billion-Dollar Boost in Near Future | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Peter Kafka writes: “Will tablets save the magazine business? Nope. But if the industry’s hopes for the iPad and its ilk pan out, digital editions could give the industry a billion-dollar boost in a few years.”

Study: iPad is preferred method of reading newspapers and magazines among consumers already owning the device in UK.

Cooper Murphy Webb writes: “According to a poll by Cooper Murphy Webb, the copywriters, Apple’s iPad is the preferred method of reading newspapers and magazines among consumers already owning the device. The poll also found that a plurality of iPad owners prefer the device for reading books and gaming.”

PJNet – Blog – Minnesota’s BringMeTheNews gets $1 million investment

Len Witt writes: “Yikes, Joel Kramer is beating the bushes for funding original journalism at MinnPost and then along comes BringMeTheNews and gets a $1 million investment for a news aggregating site centered on Minnesota.”

Patch: AOL’s Plan To Own Your Neighborhood – Forbes.com

Quentin Hardy writes: “Patch, AOL’s effort to own America’s local news, said it has grown to 100 sites in 20 states, up from six sites since the company bought the fledgling news startup in June 2009. AOL also said it hopes to be in 500 communities by year’s end, and will hire 500 more journalists for Patch. That would likely make it the biggest hirer in the decimated industry in some years.”

Knight Foundation’s new biz consultant thinks news startups can learn from outside of journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab

PJNet – Blog – Slate Launches Experimental Multimedia Lab

NewsTrust.net – Blog: Truthsquad Results: How to Fact-Check the News

Fabrice Florin writes: “My transition from writer to video journalist has not been comfortable. I constantly fumbled with the tripod — right in front of my subject — which was about as embarrassing as getting caught with one’s fly open. And I spent so many hours late into the evening with the video editing software Final Cut Express that I wondered whether I was even doing journalism anymore, or computer science.”

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

A Visit to the Online-Only Seattle Post-Intelligencer | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

ProPublica’s Top-Paid Employees All Made Six Figures in 2009 – mediabistro.com: FishbowlNY

This is why I have a hard time supporting many non-profit news models. These pay levels are outrageous. And worse, unsustainable.

Why TBD is Important – Recovering Journalist

Mark Potts writes: “I think TBD, just launched this week, is an incredibly important development for the future of local news, for many reasons.”

@michelemclellan on: “Emerging models for local news: Charlottesville Tomorrow partners with the daily newspaper.”

Facebook Had Offered Foursquare $120 Million, Foursquare Asked For $150 Million, Then Facebook Walked Away

peHUB » What Happened To Demand Media’s Traffic?

Crowdmap launches

“Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server.”

The Media Equation – New York Magazine’s Lessons for Harman and Newsweek – NYTimes.com

David Carr writes: “Let me get this straight: A very rich guy buys a financially and editorially beleaguered weekly magazine, saying he wants to preserve an important journalistic asset. That will never work, right?

I have three words for the haters: New York magazine.”

Allbritton On TBD.com: ‘You’ve Got To Have Some Staying Power’ | paidContent

Staci Kramer: “When Robert Allbritton put the money and power of Allbritton Communications behind a new DC political news site in 2007, no one knew what to expect.”

MediaShift Idea Lab . Wikileaks Case Illustrates Need for Compelling Storytelling | PBS

Andrew Whitacre writes: “Today there is another disconnect, highlighted by WikiLeaks’ publication of tens of thousands of documents purporting to show that the war in Afghanistan is going much worse and with much more innocent bloodshed than the government has admitted. Wikileaks frames this documentation similar to that of the Pentagon Papers, claiming that there’s dissonance in what the government is saying and what the public now knows.

But there’s not.

The disconnect, instead, is entirely within the public. The unsavory work of special forces, the unnecessary death of civilians, the unpalatable role of Pakistan in propping up the Taliban: All of these were already well documented. The public, however, simply didn’t know or didn’t care. The disconnect is between hearing facts and then feeling compelled to act on them.”

Flipboard customizes mix of social, news feeds
www.sfgate.com
Benny Evangelista writes: “Although the app is only available on the iPad for now, Flipboard is perhaps the best example of how personalization technology could change the way people consume information from the Web. After all, in an era when there are waves of breaking news stories, social media feeds, photos, videos and other information constantly hitting from all sides, Web surfers suffering from data overload will need to find a refuge.”

Inside the Numbers: How Demand Media Will Pitch a Billion Dollar IPO | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD
mediamemo.allthingsd.com

With Patch, AOL offers challenge to local news – The Boston Globe
www.boston.com
Peter Kafka writes: “Demand Media is a money-losing company. How will it convince Wall Street to value it at a billion dollars or more? By directing investors’ attention to a set of numbers which say it’s a very profitable company.”

The Newsonomics of the fading 80/20 rule » Nieman Journalism Lab
www.niemanlab.org

Fact Checking: Gateway Drug for Citizen, Community Journalists | Knight Digital Media Center
www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org
Amy Gahran writes: “If you’re trying to encourage people to get involved with citizen or community journalism, fact checking can be a useful starting point…”

Media Cache – Norwegian Newspaper Taps Into Web’s Efficiencies – NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com

Truthsquad – Fact-check the news – Overview Page – NewsTrust.net
newstrust.net
Chris O’Brien says: NewsTrust launches new service with Poynter.

‘Comment cops’ help manage websites | Marketplace From American Public Media
marketplace.publicradio.org

Newsweek Losses Revealed – The Daily Beast
www.thedailybeast.com
Peter Lauria writes: “But make no mistake, Harman’s pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn’t a financial one.”
Quote: But make no mistake, Harman’s pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn’t a financial one.

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

Fact Checking: Gateway Drug for Citizen, Community Journalists | Knight Digital Media Center

Amy Gahran writes: “If you’re trying to encourage people to get involved with citizen or community journalism, fact checking can be a useful starting point…”

Media Cache – Norwegian Newspaper Taps Into Web’s Efficiencies – NYTimes.com

Truthsquad – Fact-check the news – Overview Page – NewsTrust.net

NewsTrust launches new service with Poynter.

‘Comment cops’ help manage websites | Marketplace From American Public Media

PixelMags Reports Explosive Growth for iPhone and iPad Magazine Apps

Newsweek Losses Revealed – The Daily Beast

Peter Lauria writes: “But make no mistake, Harman’s pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn’t a financial one.”

But make no mistake, Harman’s pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn’t a financial one.

Disrupting journalism at street-level – Demotix signs deal with Publish2

Has Arianna Huffington Figured Out the Future? – Newsweek

Daniel Lyons writes: “What began five years ago as a spot for Huffington and her lefty celebrity friends to vent about the Bush administration has become one of the most important news sites on the Web.”

Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr – NYTimes.com

I have yet to try Tumblr or see the value. I suppose I should give it a try. Is your media org using it?

New Site Aims to Connect Reporters and Publicists – NYTimes.com

My thoughts: “Do we really need more help with this? What about a site to connect reporters with regular folks?”