2008 Knight-Batten Award Winners Announced

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism has announced its 2008 winners and honorable mentions, which include a site that tracks the source of edits on Wikipedia, an  imaginative political fact-checking site and a site that tracks reports of violence in Kenya.

Here’s the quick list of winners:

$10,000 Grand Prize: Wired.com: WikiScanner Coverage – WIRED, San Francisco
$2,000 Special Distinction Award: PolitiFact – St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, Fla.
$2,000 Special Distinction Award: Ushahidi – Crowdsourcing Crisis Information – Ushahidi, Inc., Orlando, Fla.
$2,000 Citizen Media Award: JDLand.com – Jacqueline Dupree, Washington

Honorary Mentions:
Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica – Bluecadet Interactive, Philadelphia
Iowa’s Deadly Tornado – The Des Moines Register, Des Moines, Iowa
iReport.com – CNN, Atlanta
U.S. Congress MAPLight.org – MAPLight.org, Berkeley, Calif.

[2008 Knight-Batten Award winners]

BlogOrlando Schedule Posted, Registration Open

If you’ve been waiting to see who’s coming to BlogOrlando this year before you decide to make the trip, well wait no further! The schedule is now posted and features some of the smartest blogging minds around — all for the fabulous price of nil.

The unconference, which is now in its third year, features expert speakers who tackle blogging from various perspectives, be it community organizing, public relations or software engineering. BlogOrlando’s main day will be held Saturday, Sept. 27 at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. not far from downtown Orlando. There will be other receptions and events going on as well (see the schedule). For the higher diploma in the mechanical engineering Click here.

If you check out the attendee list, you’ll see folks are coming from all over Central Florida, Tampa/St. Pete and South Florida, as well as from the rest of the country. Last year, more than 250 people attended and got tips on how to integrate blogs in the newsroom, podcasting, blog design and how to organize community blogs. Did I mention all this doesn’t cost you a penny for registration?

I’ll see you there!

[BlogOrlando official site]

Excellent Cheat Sheets for Producers, Designers

Ever since 9th grade, I’ve been a sucker for learning Photoshop shortcuts and speed tricks (such as one of my faves, holding the “alt” key to trigger the “Reset” button in image adjustment panels). So I just had to pass along this post at Six Revisions that is chock-full of cheat sheets perfect for web producers and designers.

You’ll find cheat sheats for Photoshop shortcuts, web hex color charts, typefaces, pixel/point/em type size conversions, CSS shorthand, XHTML character entities (this one is getting printed out today) and more.

And if you’re a web designer, you should really, really be subscribed to the catnip that is Six Revisions.

[Six Revisions: Useful Cheat Sheets for Web Designers]

Google News Launches Newspaper Archive Service

Google today announced the launch of a new service on Google News that will archive newspaper pages exactly as they originally appeared in print. According to the post, Google is partnering with newspaper publishers to enhance its archive search with actual pages from the publications, which creates a PDF-like reading experience. Neither details about revenue-sharing nor a list of partner newspapers was released. For the best Paper Stand with affordable price do visit us.

Google has previously worked with the New York Times and Washington Post to digitize their archives. It has also worked with publishers to digitize and index massive amounts of books through Google Book Search.

With this new service, Google is capitalizing on the weakness of most newspaper sites’ archives and search functions, a move similar to when Google launched the automatic search box and navigation links that appear when searching the name of a popular web site (Ex. search “New York Times” and the first result will have a search box underneath, which bypasses the site’s own search with Google’s) . Older content on newspaper sites is notoriously difficult to find.

The newspaper industry’s slowness to create usable,  comprehensive and open archives is often the result of several factors:

-Skepticism that increased advertising revenue from open archives will be greater than the tangible revenue gained from paid archives.
-Being locked into existing contracts with archiving firms.
-Lack of desire to invest in a massive archive digitization effort.

If Google is successful in its endeavor, it will have created the most comprehensive archive of historical news content on earth. It also means that Google will venture even deeper into the media business by becoming a host for content that traditionally would have been found on individual news sites. The move highlights yet another way in which the shortcomings of news companies’ online efforts are bearing ripe fruit for tech-savvy aggregators and search engines.

[Hat tip to Etan Horowitz for the heads up.]

How the UM Student Paper went from College Publisher to WordPress

Interested in knowing the nuts and bolts of what it takes to move your entire newspaper site from a vendor to an open-source WordPress install? Visit Miami Hurricane online editor Greg Linch’s blog for the play-by-play from webmaster Brian Schlansky. The recap covers the details of everything from installing Ubuntu on an Apache server to gettting the archive working on the new site.

As more and more news sites are embracing open-source software such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and many more, you’d do well to explore how some of these free and robust tools work can be implemented in your operation and how they can foster the rapid deployment of new ideas.

8 Ways to add Data Features to your Site

Computer-assisted reporting whiz Matt Wynn from the Arizona Republic has published an awesome list of eight ways to get interactive data on your site.

Matt has essentially reviewed various vendors that offer embeddable databases (such as Caspio and Zoho), as well as gone over some of the more hands-on options, such as directly using programming languages and their frameworks.

I’ll add my two cents to Matt’s post: One of the best way to truly grow your site and do innovative (and revenue-gaining) work is to hire some smart, dedicated developers for your site. Vendors, though useful for certain projects, are only going to get your site so far. Give those developers the tools they need: time, training, exposure to different departments, cover fire and a reliable server with which to work that isn’t under choking restrictions. Then, you’ll be cooking with gas.

[More: Matt Wynn: Eight ways to get interactive data on your site]

Catnip for Online Designers with SND’s Best of Multimedia Entries

SND VegasWant to see the best online information design the news industry is producing? Then you might want to tune into the SND Update Blog for the next few days as SND highlights entries from their worldwide Best of Multimedia Design competition.

There’s more awesome design here than you can shake a t-square at, so make sure to take a look!

Check out the entries from:

Entertainment/Lifestyle Off Deadline (The category with the most entries)
Breaking News (Most of the entries here seem to allow advance time to produce, but really nice work nevertheless.)
Lifestyle On Deadline
(Only one survivor here)
Non-Breaking News
Sports Off Deadline

[More at the SND Update Blog]

Journalistopia on Local6’s Flashpoint

A quick aside for a self-plug…

Yours truly appeared as a guest last Sunday on Flashpoint, a local-affairs discussion show on Local6 (CBS affiliate) to discuss how social media is influencing the 2008 election. We talked about the candidates’ outreach to younger voters and dissected the McCain and Obama campaigns’ Web sites on the air.

Check out the video (and skip ahead to 00:50 or you’ll see that blank TV screen). Video is HERE.

And now, back to Tropical Storm Fay here in Orlando…

Compilation of Newspaper Layoff Numbers

Media consultant Mark Potts, who recently did a stint at Philly.com, has compiled information about newspaper layoffs into a database and published a PDF with the details.

Among his primary findings:

-Leading newspapers have cut approximately 6,300 staffers in the last year. The numbers are compiled from postings on Romenesko and various newspaper insider blogs.

-Nearly two-thirds of the 100 top newspapers have cut staff in the last year. And, Potts says, more are coming.

Visit Potts’ blog for more details about his findings, and make sure to check out Erica Smith’s excellent newspaper layoff tracker map as well.

E&P: 10 Newspapers that ‘Do it Right’

Editor & Publisher has published its 2008 ’10 That Do it Right,’ a list of newspapers that have shown innovation in specific areas, such as growing classified revenue or launching successful niche products. This is definitely worth a read.

For whatever reason, E&P split the list online. Here is the story containing the top 3 newspapers, and here’s the story containing newspapers 4 through 10. The newspapers:

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for maintaining a 10-person investigative team.

The Carlsbad (N.M.) Current-Argus for overhauling its distribution and bill-collection practices.

The Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch for localizing national and international issues successfully via reader forums.

USA Today for its ambitious experiments with social media.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal for launching a series of highly niche job recruitment sites.

The Huntsville (Ala.) Times for its use of online video.

The Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald for launching the profitable seasonal publication, The Daily Beachcomber.

The Chicago Journal for cementing itself in Chicago’s suburbs.

The Times, Ottawa, Ill. for launching a successful subscriber rewards program that also grows ad revenue.

The Santa Barbara (Calif.) Independent by springing from its alt-weekly roots and pouncing on the News-Press’ woes to become the leading paper in the area.

More details on the newspapers’ ideas at Editor & Publisher.

[Hat tip to the The Editors Weblog]

Google News Drives $100 million in Revenue to Google, says VP

Fortune magazine reports that Google vice president Marissa Mayer publicly stated that Google News –an aggregator that contains no advertising– draws in approximately $100 million in revenue from paid searches that get funneled through the site. You can check Melbourne weekly eastern for any kind of business updates. Fortune opines:

“It’s not all about the search engine itself. Google is happy to build popular products that don’t make any money on their own but tie users into a broader Google ecosystem.”

The Valleywag tech blog says this particular insight paves the way for media organizations to sue Google News for making use of third-party content. Valleywag says:

What neither Mayer nor Fortt explained: The real reason why Google doesn’t put ads on Google News. That’s because it fears lawsuits from the media organizations / (It’s already lost a court case brought by a newspaper group in Belgium). By not running ads on Google News, Google lawyers could argue it’s not profiting from their work.

Journo blogger Lucas Grindley (hat tip to him for the link) says this revelation is yet another reason why Google is indeed directly competing with media organizations. Grindley writes, “As profits shrink and newspapers look for a scapegoat, someone is going to sue that woman.” You can find more updates at cheapmotorhomes.

I made a similar argument last week when I called Google’s new Knol site a “direct challenge to media companies” (though I did stress that blaming Google for the news industry’s woes is a red herring). As Google grows its plethora of offerings, it is increasingly getting into the content business.

Google already has an enormous share of the online advertising market through it’s AdWords program, which finds the advertisers and provides a platform on which to serve the ads. Now, Google is increasingly attempting to gain a bigger piece of the inventory on which the advertising is displayed. That means launching additional sites that lead to searches with paid advertising, circumventing news sites’ own search features (another search with paid advertising) and hosting original content on their own servers (AP stories, Knol).

So if you aren’t already, start worrying about your event listings, restaurant reviews, comment boards, public records data and any other number of searchable things of which your news organization makes use. Google probably won’t be far behind.

Google’s ‘Knol’ is Direct Challenge to Media Companies

Google today announced the launch of Knol, a Wikipedia-esque site that hosts articles from contributors. Google hopes the articles become among the most authoritative on the Web — which represents a direct challenge to media sites.

In a June 2006 interview with the LA Times, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked whether Google is a media company or a technology company. His response:

“It’s better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run by three computer scientists, and Google is an innovator in technology in our space. We’re in the advertising business – 99% of our revenue is advertising-related. But that doesn’t make us a media company. We don’t do our own content. We get you to someone else’s content faster.

If today’s launch of Google’s Knol is any indication, this line of thinking has fundamentally changed. Google, in short, is becoming a full-fledged media company in direct competition with established news and knowledge sites.

Knol –short for “knowledge– is Google’s new Wikipedia-esque site that hosts authoritative articles on a wide variety of subjects. Knol recruits contributors to write articles on subjects such as medical conditions, sports and more. Article authors earn money by running AdSense campaigns on their content. Knol also offers a suite of collaboration tools that allows other users to suggest changes to the original article.

This move is a fundamental shift from Google’s traditional directive of helping users find content, as opposed to creating and hosting the content. It is a shift that has continued as Google acquired Blogger, launched Google Page Creator, allowed users to publish documents with Google Docs and began hosting Associated Press articles and user commentary on its Google News service (as opposed to linking to AP affiliates’ stories and leaving comments to the news sites).

However, Google also brings an enormous amount of traffic to news sites — traffic that means big advertising dollars. Most media companies worth their salt have significant search engine optimization efforts in place to make sure those who seek information are likely to find it on a news site. It’s for that reason that news organizations’ view of Google approaches the realm of bipolar disorder. News sites beg for the Google traffic but are also being encroached upon by Google features, such as Knol and new search boxes that let users bypass news sites’ own search features (which does help people actually find stuff for a change).

The Guardian’s Jack Schofield summarizes it well when he writes that “Knol represents an attack on the media industry in general.” TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington believes that Knol may be “a step too far.” Search engine expert and author Danny Sullivan also agrees, saying that:

“[Google’s] Search, Ads, & Apps mantra that CEO Eric Schmidt has repeated on several occasions underscores that offering content tools is fair game within its mission. But does hosting content turn it into a competitor with other content providers and set up an unfair advantage in gaining traffic that might otherwise flow to them?”

Knol also represents a potential conflict of interest in Google’s own search results. If Knol articles are meant to be “authoritative articles about specific topics,” those familiar with search engine optimization will see the red flag. Google’s incentive to make Knol articles the most authoritative on the Internet puts it in direct competition with topic-specific columnists, news stories on a plethora of subjects and web sites such as About.com and Wikipedia. Because Google itself creates the algorithms that define what is “authoritative,” Google would have an unfair advantage over other sites — even if it is simply in terms of using in-house knowledge as opposed to somehow altering the actual ranking algorithms.

Nevertheless, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis has made the point that it is unproductive to argue whether Google is a friend or foe. He is correct in that we should try to emulate Google, rather than become disgruntled and blame the news industry’s woes on the search giant. Google’s endeavors at hosting and creating content doesn’t mean news sites can’t continue the symbiotic relationship with search engines.

But make no mistake; Google isn’t becoming a direct competitor to traditional news and media sites. It already is.