:Journalistopia

From Wired.com: “For example: What if those written words were watching you reading them and making adjustments accordingly? Eye-tracking technology and processor-packed tablets promise to react, based on how you’re looking at text – where you pause, how you stare, where you stop reading altogether – in a friction-reducing implementation of the Observer Effect. The act of reading will change what you are reading.”

Read More at Wired

[Hat tip to Journerdist Will Sullivan]

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From ReadWriteWeb: “Make room on the bleachers, the robot reporter wants to sit down and watch the game. Sports statistics company StatSheet says it will have technology ready this Summer to turn statistics for hundreds of small college basketball games into richly reported blow-by-blow coverage of how the contests unfold.

People have been talking about robot reporters for years, but sports coverage is a logical, structured field for it to happen in and StatSheet says it will soon bring a product to market.”

Read more at ReadWriteWeb

[Hat tip to Doug Fisher, who has a great post on this too.]

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• Survey: Sports writers hate them blogs
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From Old Media, New Tricks: “In a recent blog post, Dan Zarrella published results from an ongoing analysis of Facebook data points. One interesting statistic stood out: Facebook users share anywhere from 20 to 50 percent more stories on weekends than they do during the week.”

Read more at Old Media, New Tricks

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From Alan Mutter: “Far from being fuddy-duddy Luddites, newspaper website visitors actually appear to be early and passionate technology adopters.

The surprisingly high interest in high tech among online news consumers is revealed in a ground-breaking poll by Greg Harmon of ITZ Belden, who discovered that news-site visitors own 1.5 times more smart phones than the average American and are eager to get their hands on the new iPad.”

Read more at Reflections Of A Newsosaur

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• Nielsen’s top newspaper Web site ratings
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“Redesigning a website, or even a single page, can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Re-opening a project that you so happily completed can take major mental willpower. However, improving a website doesn’t need to take weeks, or even days. I’m a believer in baby steps: making incremental progress, small victories, minor adjustments with big results.

That’s where my 45-minute plan comes into play. In less time than you spend watching The Bachelor each week, you can have a dramatic (and measurable) effect on your website.”

Read more at Six Revisions

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Are you passionate about engaging with audiences online? Are you a fanatic about trying the latest social media apps? Do you have the skills to create greate online content? Well, we’re looking for you! Courant.com and CTnow.com (home of FOX CT), is looking to hire a talented social media coordinator.

The social media coordinator would work in the newsroom to spearhead our sites’ social media efforts, plan local events, train staffers, coordinate with the marketing group and create locally focused content. In this role, you’d be reporting to the digital platform manager (i.e., me, the online editor).

The experience in what we call Connecticut’s Newsroom really is a unique one. We have a strong newspaper, TV station and digital operation all housed under one roof working cohesively to produce incredible content every day. It’s a fascinating petri dish of cross-platform journalism.

So, you interested yet? If so, check out the job posting and shoot me a note at dasanchezATcourant.com.

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From the NY Times: “Only 35 percent of the people who go online for news have a favorite site, and just 21 percent are more or less ‘monogamous,’ relying primarily on a single Internet news source, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, in a report to be released Monday by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

But 57 percent of that audience relies on just two to five sites. The findings parallel studies that say that people with hundreds of television channels tend to stick to a relative handful.”

Read more at NYTimes.com

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• Study: Newspaper Sites Embrace User Content, Comments in 2008
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Facebook users tend to prefer broadcast to newspaper media sites, according to Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins.

Check out her post containing plenty of metrics trends charts.

[via Editor's Weblog]

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Australian professor Julie Posetti has a fascinating post on how Twitter has shaped the thinking and workflow of political journos.

From her post: “Twitter is becoming a vehicle for participatory democracy in Australia thanks to its ability to create unmediated interaction between political journalists, engaged citizens and politicians.”

“In the race to tweet, journalists are knocking down the walls that have in the past segregated media outlets within the Press Gallery. This is happening via content-sharing and cross-pollination between fiercely competitive commercial and public broadcast networks, newspapers and wire services.”

Read her whole post with info from her findings on PBS MediaShift

[via Steve Buttry]

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“But though it may feel like putting the cart before the horse, there are many good reasons and ways to sell ad space on low-traffic websites. What you need to always keep in mind is that, while advertisers are drawn to high traffic numbers, they desire something else even more: high conversion rates. There are plenty of success stories of websites that have limited traffic but sell a ton of advertising. These websites succeed because they do one thing well: they deliver the right type of customer to the right type of business.” Read the whole post at Smashing Magazine

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• Guide to surviving journalism as a high-tech industry
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“The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. Getting news online fits into a broad pattern of news consumption by Americans; six in ten (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.”

See the study here

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More Journalistopia:

• Readership Institute Releases 2008 Readership Study
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“In this article are than a dozen potential future user interfaces that we’ll be seeing over the next few years (and some further into the future).” Read more…

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More Journalistopia:

• Study: Newspaper Sites Embrace User Content, Comments in 2008
• New York Times publisher: ‘I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years’
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