Journalistopia

Knight-Batten Award Winners Announced

Danny Sanchez — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:26:15 +0000

The Knight-Batten Award winners have been announced, and Sunlight Live took the $10,000 grand prize for its experiment in providing real-time data context to the live health care reform hearings.

Other prizewinners include other notable sites such as ProPublica, 48 HR Magazine, PolitiFact, Publish2 and Ushahidi.

iPad Users Mostly Male, Love Photos [Y! Mobile]

Danny Sanchez — Fri, 07 May 2010 15:00:06 +0000

From Yahoo’s Mobile Blog: “As expected within the classic early-adopter profile, we identified a male skew in the 35-44 age group among these early users. In fact, among all users, men outnumber women 2:1.”

“The iPad Yahoo! user closely followed the interests on Yahoo! that we would suspect: Flickr, Finance, Sports and News”

More results and charts at Y! Mobile Blog

[Hat tip to the Newsosaur]

25+ Useful Online Media Infographics [Webdesigner Depot]

Danny Sanchez — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:10:03 +0000

Remember all of those awesome inforgraphics you’ve found across the internet? You know like the giant social media map or the subway map of Internet trends.

They’re all compiled here. [Update 4-29: Apologies for the link fail. The link is posted now.]

Report: Women 55+ Facebook’s Fastest-Growing Demographic

Danny Sanchez — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:49:54 +0000

From the Shaping The Newspaper Blog, sourced from a Morgan Stanley Research report:

“To the surprise of many, Facebook in not just the privilege of tech-savvy kids – the college and post-college folks (18- to 24-yearolds), which the site originally aimed to target, now only account for less than 25 percent of total users. The fastest-growing demographic group is women age of 55 and older, up 175 percent since September 2008.”

What Does One Call A Programmer/Journalist? [PBS MediaShift]

Danny Sanchez — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:43:11 +0000

From Aron Pilhofer writing at MediaShift:

“This is a problem of no small significance, because as the career paths of journalists and developers converge, the labels we use affect how we are seen by those around us. I experienced this first-hand a few years ago when I went from being a journalist who used data in his reporting to a computer-assisted reporting specialist.”

“Then there’s the term that seems to be more and more in vogue — “programmer-journalist.” And while that definitely captures the dual nature of mission, it feels like a bit of a cop-out to me. Like we couldn’t find a good title, so we’ll just jam a couple half-baked ones together. It’s clunky to say, clunkier to write and it’s just a little too combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell, you know?”

Newspaper Comments: Forget Anonymity! The Problem Is Management [Scott Rosenberg]

Danny Sanchez — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:28:33 +0000

From Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard: “The great mistake so many newspapers and media outlets made was to turn on the comments software and then walk out of the room. They seemed to believe that the discussions would magically take care of themselves.

If you opened a public cafe or a bar in the downtown of a city, failed to staff it, and left it untended for months on end, would you be surprised if it ended up as a rat-infested hellhole?”

More at Wordyard

Slash? Backslash?

Danny Sanchez — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:02:24 +0000

Another goodie from XKCD, which is on a roll of late:

Predicting The Future Of Obituaries

Danny Sanchez — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:57:52 +0000

A team of Northwestern University students led by pioneering professor Rich Gordon has published the results of a compelling analysis on Legacy.com and the future of newspaper obituaries.

Gordon published an overview today on Poynter E-Media Tidbits, where he urged the newspaper industry to pay more attention to the state of obituaries.

Obituary revenue has weathered the massive industry changes relatively well for now, Gordon says, but that may quickly change as it did for other classified categories. He writes:

“For newspapers, the key lesson from history should be clear: Act now, before it’s too late. And don’t let the industry’s current, relatively strong position in death notices and obituaries stand in the way of innovation, collaboration and partnerships.”

“Historically, via death notices and obituaries, newspapers met the needs of all of these audience segments. But changes in technology, media usage and cultural norms are combining to threaten newspapers’ dominance of this category.”

So check out Gordon’s piece here and the recommendations his students made to Legacy (PDF download here).

At Snopes, A Quest To Debunk Misinformation Online [NYTimes]

Danny Sanchez — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:35:03 +0000

From the NYTimes: “The popularity of Snopes – it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month – puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.

After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.

In a given week, Snopes tries to set the record straight on everything from political smears to old wives’ tales.”

The Twitter News Instinct

Danny Sanchez — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:53:21 +0000

See the original at XKCD, my all-time favorite webcomic.

Eye-Tracking Tablets And The Promise of Text 2.0 [Wired]

Danny Sanchez — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:02:44 +0000

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.”

Automated Sports Reporters Coming This Summer [ReadWriteWeb]

Danny Sanchez — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:13:39 +0000

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.”