For Friday, March 21, 2014, here are some media stories of note:
Turkey has blocked Twitter. The prime minister promised to eradicate it, and soon after it could not be used by the country's 10 million Tweeps. This is the latest in a string of measures to suppress free expression in the country and focus on state-run media to inform citizens. Not surprisingly, there is a large effort to thwart the block, including the use of Google as a workaround.
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Poynter has a healthy debate under way between two of its writers on the value of page views as a metric for online news sites. Rick Edmonds has taken the view that the day has come to ditch the page view and measure other forms of engagement, but News Corp.'s Raju Narisetti argues on Poynter that page views remain important and not only as "vanity" metrics in the business model of journalism. It is a recommended discussion.
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This week's launch of FiveThirtyEight at ESPN has prompted several posts on the value and challenges of data journalism. The Columbia Journalism Review's Tanveer Ali argues it will not succeed without a narrative, without recognizing that numbers are a means to telling the story and not the story itself. Ben Thompson, meanwhile, looks on the stratechery blog at the decline of the newspaper and its incompatibility with the Internet's capacity to find what people want. Self-promotion: I posted this advice to the newspaper on LinkedIn overnight.
Turkey has blocked Twitter. The prime minister promised to eradicate it, and soon after it could not be used by the country's 10 million Tweeps. This is the latest in a string of measures to suppress free expression in the country and focus on state-run media to inform citizens. Not surprisingly, there is a large effort to thwart the block, including the use of Google as a workaround.
***
Poynter has a healthy debate under way between two of its writers on the value of page views as a metric for online news sites. Rick Edmonds has taken the view that the day has come to ditch the page view and measure other forms of engagement, but News Corp.'s Raju Narisetti argues on Poynter that page views remain important and not only as "vanity" metrics in the business model of journalism. It is a recommended discussion.
***
This week's launch of FiveThirtyEight at ESPN has prompted several posts on the value and challenges of data journalism. The Columbia Journalism Review's Tanveer Ali argues it will not succeed without a narrative, without recognizing that numbers are a means to telling the story and not the story itself. Ben Thompson, meanwhile, looks on the stratechery blog at the decline of the newspaper and its incompatibility with the Internet's capacity to find what people want. Self-promotion: I posted this advice to the newspaper on LinkedIn overnight.
