Archive for the 'Online' Category

Chicago Tribune tries the YourHub model of local

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

The trib launched a community site today, triblocal.com. It looks like what a newspaper thinks would work for the model of community participation, and in the write-up the Tribune gives the site they mention TribLocal takes its cues from YourHub. The article also includes choice phrases like “taking a tentative step into a brave new […]

A guide for writing a guide to the content on a news site

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

Newspapers don’t come with a manual. They never have. They’re simple, right? Maybe, but this “no need to explain” thing is turning into a problem online, and, sometimes in print.
Without a voice from the newspaper giving advice to the reader on how to use the newspaper, each reader gets to figure it out on […]

Poynter and the most-popular vs. most-read articles

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Plenty of online publications have those “most-popular” charts that measure the articles / blog posts that get the most clicks.
Poynter released part of an eyetrack study that says “Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.” That’s cool — and that opens the door to another type of most-popular metric. In […]

Question: How have online publishers innovated with local community?

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Each time I see that last question I wrote I dislike it more. Out with bad ideas, in with new ones (and give the new ones a couple weeks until they’re allowed to be called bad).
This question aims at the idea that newspapers are in a unique place online. No other legacy medium publishes so […]

The Oregonian’s putting their photos up on flickr

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Newspapers use plenty of vendors to handle their online content. The Oregonian has started posting their photos on Flickr here.
Why is this notable? Because the O doesn’t get any ad money for the photos they post.
What might be the point of this? It’s another way to draw in an audience that wouldn’t otherwise […]

Having some fun with newspaper content: Today’s Rock Stars

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Each day this new blog, Today’s Rock Stars, writes up the newspapers that use the rock star metaphor in their articles. Yesterday it was some Canadian and Stephen Hawking. “It’s a rare day with neither sports rock stars nor political rock stars” wrote the narrator, Matt Gill.
This is a goofy way to use newspaper content […]

“Newsroom ISO programmers” gaining online buzz

Friday, March 9th, 2007

There’s been a stream of posts this week about the “newsroom-programmer” connection. You could say it culminated today with Holovaty’s “work with me at the Washington Post” post. Then there’s Mark Glaser’s state-of-the-geek-in-the-newsroom post. Then there’s all the discussion around those posts.
In the spirit of inclusion, I’d like to invite folk in the Denver / […]

Bleeding Information

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Last month I was talking with a co-worker, talking about what was going on with newspaper-dot-coms these days. This phrase slipped out, and I think it makes sense. Newspapers, magazines, local television and radio news operations are bleeding information. Every stroke of the shovel they make from legacy distribution methods to the web bleeds more […]

Wonder how often this works — automated letter-to-the-editor submission web app

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

Ran across a web site tonight to help people get their letters to the editor published… multiple, multiple times… WonderVoice. “The idea behind WonderVoice is simple: enable writers to submit their work to multiple editors without the pain of having to do it one submission at a time.”
Unfortunately their signup verification script was busted, so […]

When (and where) a news article isn’t enough

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

The title is misleading: an article is never enough. There are plenty of fun and useful things to be done with information now that we’ve got the internet, and displaying a bunch of paragraphs and maybe a photo or two is quite meager.
There’s been some talk on the web about the failings of the article […]

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