These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.
November 3, 2009
I'm not ashamed to admit it: The first time I saw
Twitter, I thought, "What's the point?" Maybe you did too, or maybe you're just more perceptive than I am. Even Twitter's founders have said they didn't know exactly what it was when they started working on it. (
Biz Stone: "If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time.")
For every Twitter enthusiast, there was, I suspect, a point of realization that this thing could actually be incredibly useful. Some have cited the plane-in-the-Hudson story as their aha! moment. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a gradual understanding. I began to see its potential as a real-time information source when I first learned of a few important news items -- both big international stories and news of a more personal nature -- through Twitter.
I began following like-minded people for the interesting links they would post. Before long, information overload took hold. I tried to cull my follow list so I could read everything. I worried I would miss something. Finally, I learned to embrace the firehose and not try to process the whole stream.
But still I thought there must be a better way to separate signal from noise. And then I noticed that the most interesting and important items were appearing maybe three or four times in my Twitter feed. Since then, I've wished for a way to mine my feed for those links.
Last week I heard about TwitterTim.es and was thrilled to find it does exactly what I wanted. I spoke with Maxim Grinev, the project's technical lead, about TwitterTim.es and where it's headed. More...
1 comment | 
Archive Link
October 20, 2009
I'm amused by a discussion on SEO and headline-writing taking place at the
Nieman Journalism Lab site and on the Canadian blog
MediaStyle. It seems a seminar on SEO for editors at
The Globe and Mail offended the Canadian paper's online books editor, who interpreted it as a charge to dumb down headlines.
Most commentary has focused on the question of why his post was removed from the Globe and Mail's books blog, In Other Words. I'll let others tackle that angle. What I'm interested in is whether the writer, Peter Scowen, has a point. I believe he does, even if it's poorly expressed: More...
No comments | Archive Link
April 16, 2009
Think about the traffic statistics you refer to when you look at Omniture or Google Analytics data for your site.
Unique visitors?
Pageviews? What do they actually tell you about your audience? The ubiquitous unique visitor metric treats your most passionate and thorough users exactly the same as those of the one-hit scan-and-scram variety. And pageview tallies are so apples-to-oranges in these days of Flash and AJAX that they're rendered almost meaningless. If you really want to describe your audience, it's time for some new metrics.
But what else is there? The folks at BusinessWeek think they have an answer, and it's not about how much content users consume but rather what they do with it. I asked BusinessWeek's online editor, John Byrne, about his team's efforts to go beyond pageviews and visits to quantify something more inscrutable: user engagement.
More...
11 Comments | Archive Link
March 18, 2009
[Editor's note: The past week roiled the journalism business, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went to online-only, the former Rocky Mountain News staff tried to revive the paper as an independent website and Clay Shirky painted a revolutionary picture for what is happening in the industry.Rather than take a hipshot off those headlines, though, we're going to be proactive on OJR this week, starting with this piece from Eric Ulken, who offers a roadmap for established news organizations to enliven their online efforts.]
In a nondescript training room in the BBC's White City building in West London, about 80 people are huddled around tables with placards bearing names like "Dr. Who" and "Top Gear" [BBC TV show titles], engaged in discussions on topics ranging from user-generated content to alternate-reality gaming.
The assembled thinkers and tinkerers represent many different arms of the British media behemoth, from radio news to Web production to technology. About the only things they have in common besides an employer are an interest in innovation and an eye to the future.
They're taking part in the second BeeBCamp, an "unconference" in the tradition of BarCamp (and partly inspired by the Guardian's GameCamp) that aims to bring together forward-thinking staffers and a few outsiders to talk about themes loosely related to the future of the BBC. [Disclosure: I was one of those outsiders, and, in the everybody-pitches-in spirit of the unconference, I talked about my work in data journalism at the L.A. Times.]
BeeBCamp, according to the BBC blog's write-up of the event, "is designed as a collective, spontaneous bashing together of ideas, with no set structure to the day." A whiteboard goes up first thing in the morning, and anybody who has an idea for a discussion or presentation claims a spot on the schedule. For example, one participant wrote: "We own twitter.com/bbc. What should we do with it?" (Some ideas here.) More...
1 comment | Archive Link
February 25, 2009
A lot of bits have been spilled over the apparent absence of a viable business model for news on the Web to replace one that no longer works for print. The ad-supported model doesn't
seem to work, but clearly neither do pay walls. There's even
talk of micropayments again (
hello, 1998!).
I'm no economist, but I think the problem comes down to this: The Internet is a single, efficient market governed by the laws of supply and demand*. Because there's surplus ad inventory online — particularly low-grade inventory — prices are falling. But what if the surplus inventory is largely the result of a glut of duplicative content? Would the problem go away if news organizations simply stopped doing about half of what they do and focused on the stuff nobody else is producing? More...
2 Comments | Archive Link
January 28, 2009
Back in November, some folks from The New York Times and ProPublica
filed an ambitious grant proposal in the
Knight News Challenge competition. It asks for $1 million to fund DocumentCloud, a solution that would apply the wisdom of the crowd to the problem of organizing and examining documents.
The much-buzzed-about idea aims to develop open standards and APIs to make source documents "easy to find, share, read and collaborate on." (You can find the full text of the proposal here.)
I asked three of the proposal's authors, Aron Pilhofer of the Times and Scott Klein and Eric Umansky of ProPublica, to elaborate on their vision for document nirvana. More...
1 comment | Archive Link
November 21, 2008
In early 2007, when the Los Angeles Times launched its
Homicide Report blog — an effort to chronicle every homicide in Los Angeles County — it was clear that there were important geographic and demographic dimensions to the information that a blog format wouldn't fully capture. What we needed was a
ChicagoCrime.org-style map that would let users focus on areas of interest to them, with filters that would enable them to "play" with the data and explore trends and patterns for themselves. Problem was, the web staff (of which I was a part) lacked the tools and the expertise to build such a thing, so the blog launched without a map. (Sound familar?)
It took several months to secure the tech resources and a couple more months to create wireframes and spec out requirements for what would become the Homicide Map, with the help of a couple of talented developers and a project manager on part-time loan from the website's IT department. We were fortunate, of course: We actually had access to this kind of expertise, and since then we've hired a couple of dedicated editorial developers. I'm aware that others might not have it so good.
Last week, Robert Niles argued that news organizations should be in the business of creating "killer apps". Put another way, there is a need to develop tools that hew to the content rather than the other way around. But creating the functionality Robert describes takes a closer connection between news thinking and tech thinking than is possible within news organizations' traditional structures and skill sets.
In this post, I'll try to squeeze some wisdom out of the lessons we learned in the process of assembling the Times' Data Desk, a cross-functional team of journalists responsible for collecting, analyzing and presenting data online and in print. More...
4 Comments | Archive Link
June 9, 2008
Which campaign will get to 270 in November, and how will they do it? The L.A. Times has built an
interactive map that allows readers to create and test their own electoral vote scenarios, and then embed those scenarios in their own sites.
(Sample after the jump.)
We're hoping to improve on this as the campaign heats up, perhaps adding demographic info and data on past elections by state. Would love to hear suggestions.
More...
2 Comments | Archive Link
RSS Feed
