The Knight Foundation announced its list of best runner-ups for this year’s Knight News Challenge.
Here, you’ll find proposals for community content management systems, initiatives to prevent censorship, geo-reporting and much more.
The winners will be announced May 14 at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas.
Check out the list for a plethora of interesting ideas.
Image URL:
http://journalistopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/cartoon-05-27-07-ussprint.jpg
Here’s some advice from OJR’s Robert Niles on how to keep your journalism job.
NAA report on huge newspaper revenue declines here. Online currently represents 7.5% of newspaper ad revenue, according to NAA.
Editor and Publisher reports today that we’re all spectacularly screwed:
The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
Folks, this is some of the worst –though not at all unexpected– news about our industry to date. How about we all take the weekend to dream up a big money-making epiphany?
The New York Times reports on a new search feature from Google that is causing concern among some publishers. Google unveiled an easier search-within-a-site feature, which allows a user to circumvent a news site’s built-in search.
From the Times story:
The results of the search are almost all individual company pages. Google tops those results with a link to the home page of the Web site in question, adds another search box, and offers users the chance to let Google search for certain things within that site.
The problem, for some in the industry, is that when someone enters a term into that secondary search box, Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells against the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination Web site.
Could this cause a drop in page views from users searching on Google rather than on your news site? On the flipside, will it ultimately drive more traffic by letting users find your site’s content easier? And what about the ad revenue Google will pull in from this?
Friends, keep an eye on your internal site search numbers as this develops.
[Hat tip to Roger Simmons]
Nielsen released its February newspaper site audience ratings on E&P:
The hot list: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (up more than 100%), Philly.com (up 77%) and Newsday (up 91%). The downers: The Houston Chronicle (down 18%), and the San Diego Union-Tribune and Miami Herald (both down about 7%).
After a hack attack that would have devastated lesser journos, Richard Koci Hernandez and crew are back in action with MultimediaShooter.
If you haven’t yet, go check it out for one of the best sites out there about news video and multimedia.
Journalistopians, I have a small request: I’m looking for interesting blogs about online journalism and/or design written in Spanish, and I could use your help.
If you know of any blogs that fit the bill, please drop a comment with a link, or message me at dansanufATyahoo.com. Thanks!
***
(Perdóname si mi español no está perfecto…)
Journalistopianos, tengo una petición pequeña: Estoy buscando blogs interesante sobre el periodismo y diseño electrónico, y necesito su ayuda.
Si usted conoce algunos blogs, por favor déjame un comentario o envíeme un correo electrónico a dansanufATyahoo.com. ¡Gracias!
So you think that Google Maps doohickey you built is really cool? Well, you might have to get your map game to the next level because Google Maps is exploring some seriously interesting data layers for their maps application:
Google filed a patent titled “Dynamic Exploration of Maps” that would let users add easy-to-use templates for specific kinds of data, such as crime indexes, average home prices, average noise levels, schools and user ratings.
So start giving some serious thought about what we news sites can do better or differently. I know I will…
[Hat tip to SEO by the Sea]
[More geojournalism in the Maps category]
If you’re wanting to gain a better understanding of how to optimize blogs for search engines (or what some, like myself, like to call “getting some Google Juice”), look no further than SEOBook’s free Blogger’s Guide to SEO.
Being a bit of an SEO geek, I can attest that this is one of the best resources (balanced with length) on blogs and search engines. This may fall under the “obvious” category, but it bears emphasizing: If you’re working on a news site, you absolutely must understand the fundamentals of how search engine optimization works.
A few quick, blog-specific SEO pointers and tidbits that come to mind:
-Don’t be bashful about submitting your blog to aggregators and directories. Blogs usually have built-in pinging mechanisms that spread your blog posts all over the world (really neat interactive graphic here). Because of this, blogs have an advantage over many of the static news site pages out there.
-Avoid starting your blog on a free out-of-the-box hosted service such as Blogger, WordPress.com (not the same as a WordPress install on your own server) . It may cost you a few bucks a month and some initial work to host it yourself, but when the day comes that you want to move your blog to a better domain, you won’t find yourself painfully stuck. You’ll also have way more flexibility to tweak your site.
-Do your best to build relationships with other bloggers and drop comments on their blogs. Respond to your comments. The more that active bloggers check out your blog, the more inbound links you’re likely to receive.
-Follow the Google News Blog. This will keep you informed of important changes to how Google News picks up your content (this is mostly just for mainstream media blogs).
-It usually comes down to a beautifully keyworded headline. Don’t you forget it!
Head on over to the conference site for South by Southwest (SXSW) for free video from the media and entertainment conference. You’ll want to particularly peruse the Interactive Coverage. And yes, the much-maligned Zuckerberg/Lacy interview is there too.
I wasn’t one of the fortunate souls who made it out to Texas for the conference, so if you have any specific recommendations on what to watch, do share in the comments.
And to think I just got Netflix this weekend, and I’ll be spending a couple of hours watching tiny pixelated videos of guys talking about media nerd stuff…
Don’t live in fear of a blog meltdown. Make a backup. Photo: U.S. National Archives
This isn’t an online journalism post, but a Public Service Announcement to fellow bloggers.
A few journalism-related blogs I read regularly have gone down recently, thanks to idiot hosting companies and soulless hackers. So a word to the wise: spare yourself major agony, go into your admin tools and create a backup of your blog database (and, um, not on the same server your blog is on).
[UPDATE: Richard Koci Hernandez recommends this WordPress backup plug-in.]
Here are instructions for WordPress, Movable Type and Blogger. Do it yesterday. It really only takes a few minutes.
Perhaps a well-placed lolcat caption can redeem this 1981 TIME magazine cover…
Usually I try to spotlight stuff that news organizations are doing right, but there’s also much to be learned from the downright horrific. So check out TIME’s humorous jab at itself with its list of worst TIME magazine covers ever.
If you’re looking for awesomely bad, my votes go to the 1981 ice cream cover and the 1928 Robert McCormick and Joseph Patterson cover.
And the obligatory Journalistopia Lesson: never underestimate the unlimited potential for re-purposing your old cra …er… archival material.
[Hat tip to SND Update and to TIME]
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