kirk lapointe's themediamanager.com: how the news business is changing

The announcement that the New York Times and Linkedin have found a way to provide customized pages to Linkedin users bodes well for future old media-social media alliances. Now it should be possible for an array of such deals to permit content to find new audiences..
In essence the Times is serving sector-related content to sector-working Linkedin users. A good deal for both.

With all apologies to Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, I have stolen that headline --- or that line --- he used some time ago at a conference I attended. I'm not sure if he coined it, but if someone had it trademarked in recent times, they might be in for a killing in the years ahead.
In reading AdAge, it's apparent that the big guys are going to start linking to the others and aggregating content to be the best utility for their audiences. This has started to happen in the New York Times' blogs, but it'll now be a feature of the home page material in the fall. The page itself, says Jonathan Landman, will be more of a blog patch.
The notion of linking out to others' news is coming into its own. The sentiment is that the competitive terrain in future will have a little less to do with who reported what than with who can gather what. In other words, do what you do best, link to the rest.
This is more than a little frightening for organizations that invest in work that then is linked by aggregators, but if everyone starts, no one will be able to stop it.

I am on the other side of the world on what passes for hoidays in the 21st Century and it seems everyone back home is in need of therapy.
A read of Mark Potts' usually-even-handed Recovering Journalist blog is downright depressing. About the best he hopes is that a string of bankruptcies in America will stave off the vultures or precipitate a rethink of the industry.

There's nothing like a power outage for the soul of a newsroom.
Journalists use their wiliest resiliance to defy the odds and produce on deadline. No matter how challenging human dynamics often are, there is something about an outage that builds an exceptional bond.
I'm several time zones away from a massive power outage in the Vancouver downtown that may take another day to restore, but the Sun and Province newsrooms used technology (mainly the Canadian-developed BlackBerry) to get the papers out overnight. Thankfully generators revived the production system by Monday afternoon, but not before many hours of production had been lost. Still only a fragment of the newsroom is fully wired and humming.
Here is a Sun accounting of how it got done, typically reserved in its storytelling about what people had to do to report and edit.

 If advertisers are only willing to really pay as their ads are viewed, should publishers only pay if the content is read?
Blogger Tim Anderson is the latest to weigh in on a fledgling debate on the way in which writers should be compensated in the digital sphere. His piece is based on an interesting technical method from Chris Green on quantifying an author's appeal online. Anderson and others have noted the problems in this approach. There are many dynamics in the publisher-writer relationship that transcend click-per-view models.
Forget the click fraud issue; technology can likely address that. Bigger issues are the value attached to a reader (income, education, etc. that an advertiser might cherish), how a particular piece of writing contributes to the value of the publication (its placement and prominence), and how important a publisher wants to retain a writer for competitive purposes --- among many other things. Pay-per-click doesn't encompass those issues in the least.
In recent weeks Gawker has pruned its pay-per-click compensation for its writers.
Anderson notes that a changing model of journalism is going to need rethinking on compensation. Newsrooms essentially pay the same rates for their staff's work. But how that might change is anyone's guess, and a minefield after the guess.

Most likely we all come from households that tacked things on a corkboard or magnetically attached them to the fridge. Which is the principle behind some of the initiatives at newspapers: Create clippable, useful guides to life that bear enough importance to be kept in a prominent place in the home or office.
Follow The Media suggests this so-called hyperlocalism is part of the shift in newsrooms away from far-flung coverage. I'd prefer to echo folks like Jeff Jarvis, who say newsrooms should do what they do best and link to the rest.

From former Philadelphia Inquirer editor Rich Heidorn Jr. comes TreeHouse Media, a turn-on-its-head approach to the contemporary angry journalist. The site is striving to give journalists the tools to self-soothe. It's discursive, but not looking for gripes and grievances. Rather, it has a collaborative, let's-get-out-of-this-morass-together tone. Mainly it seems to say the newsroom is morphing into a batch of self-employed service providers, so join the club.

It is a treat to see the revival of Interactive Narratives, which had long ago aggregated the traditional media's bravest work in new media.
The new incarnation is still dazzling but less futuristic. It is mainly a collection of the best and brightest of today's work by conventional media in the digital sphere.
Original showcaser Andrew DeVigal and two others relaunched the site under the auspices and sponsorship of the Online News Association. Already on the site today are recent multimedia packages from the Washington Post on an earthquake in China and Las Vegas Sun on prescription drug consumption. Each offers a different twist on conventional storytelling.

We all like getting the unmarked brown envelope, sealed by someone who has had enough with the subterfuge or the disinformation or the misguided media. We can only imagine what it feels like to have that brown envelope contain a secret we kept from the public.
Which is why Wikileaks has been such an adventure online since its inception a year ago. It has been fearless --- almost dangerous --- in taking documents that weren't destined for the public domain and putting them up for all to see.
In the early days of the Internet, there was criticism that roughshod sites might elude accountability by placing servers and domain registration in jurisdictions indifferent or averse to prosecution. Wikileaks has revived that concern, and many groups that seek to take it down have been thwarted in part by its mirrored addresses and vaguely organized operation.
But it hasn't pratfalled over the tripwires. Large news organizations have cited its findings. Large companies, groups and governments have descended at times to shut the site --- all of them unsuccessfully. And somehow Wikileaks has adhered to a discipline of verification.
Wired's profile this month does well in examining its challenges of securing content in a very security-conscious information environment.

The explosion of GPS, geo-tagged content, and geo-locating cellular phones has opened opportunities for journalism, advertising and marketing. Location-based technologies give rise to Locative Journalism, or LoJo, which provide a more substantially relevant relationship between where you are and what information you consume. This rich relationship is part of our future.
The Readership Institute has published a smart primer from Medill School of Journalism professor Rich Gordon on the qualities of LoJo. It makes a good argument for geo-tagging stories, but it also includes a very good plea for strengthening audio --- the lost art in digital journalism.
As newsrooms transform, it will be necessary to adopt the qualities of this emerging technology. It will impossible to miss the impact of geo-locative advertising and marketing, so journalism clearly has to play along.