A quick roundup of some items that caught our eye lately...
State of the News Media 2010: An Annual Report of American Journalism
This seventh edition of the annual report on the health and status of American journalism, courtesy of Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, will keep you busy all weekend. Trends, attitudes, behaviors, analyses. It's comprehensive, and massive. Think 180,000 words.
Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments. To do so we gather in one place as much data as possible about all the major sectors of journalism, identify trends across media, mark key findings, delve deep into each sector and note areas for further inquiry.Read it here.
This year’s report is the most interactive it’s ever been, and contains a number of new features...
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Facebook Overtakes Google as Most Popular U.S. Website
(Daily Finance)
Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the United States for the first time, according to new data from Hitwise, which measures Internet traffic. For the week ending March 13, the social networking juggernaut registered 7.07% market share, beating the search giant's 7.03% market share.
The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Facebook briefly topped Google last Christmas and New Year's, but this is the first time the website's weekly numbers have beaten Google.Read more here.
The new data is sure to unnerve Google, which has been trying to crack into the social networking market -- with controversial results. For Facebook, the data will add further fuel to its push to go public sometime in the next year or two, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has suggested. Analysts predict that when Facebook does go public, it could see an immediate valuation of $35 billion -- a figure which could rise to $100 billion by 2015.
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USC Annenberg Launches Multimedia Series
The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has teamed up with the Center for Investigative Reporting to launch a multimedia series titled “Hunger in the Golden State.”
The series, to debut March 19, will run in newspapers, on radio stations and online news outlets statewide over the next three weeks.Read more here.
Over the course of six months, USC Annenberg journalism graduate students interviewed dozens of state and local-level food bank officials as well as the Californians who struggle with food shortages every day. The reporting unearthed new numbers that show hunger is rising at an unprecedented rate nationwide, affecting millions - including those in affluent areas - but is invisible to many.
The stories explore food waste, nutrition in schools and ways to help Californians fighting to ward off hunger. The project reveals that nearly one in eight people in California has asked for food assistance in the last year. Food banks and social services are overwhelmed, reporters found.
The Los Angeles Times teamed a staff reporter with a student to produce a story explaining how California leaves millions of federal dollars on the table because of problems in the way the state runs its end of the food stamp program.
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The Newsonomics of Emerging News Video
(By Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab)
The New York Times. Video. Three years ago, that seemed like an oxymoron, save the Times’ occasional forays into TV experiments. Now, Times TV pops up in front of us on airplane TVs and news video has become an emerging feature of Times sites. As Apple and NYT staffers plot behind closed doors in the Times building, we can expect that Times video will be a key element of the iPad NYT launch.
Behind what we see, though, are some critical developments in processing of digital video, the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting that often determines time-to-market, and business failure or success.Read more here.
For the Times, it’s not a matter of harvesting decades of archived film; it’s about making the most of its last three years of a video push. The Newsonomics are these:
Lastly, the outsourcing here is essential. News companies are in learning mode — what is it they do best?; what do they leave to others. In this case, the Times and others are applying my Newsonomics Law #9: Apply the 10 Percent Rule, the heavy lifting of journalism can be aided and abetted by smart use of technology.
- Make more licensing income off the video. ...
- Better usage of companies’ own produced video (and partnered video) on their own websites, apps, and tablets. ...
- Put your content into new marketplaces. ....
Video is in the air — C-SPAN’s release of its volumimous archives reenforces that notion — but as usual, it’s the less-glamorous, behind-the-scenes work that will separate the winners from the companies stuck in text mode.
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Google and Partners Seek TV Foothold
(New York Times)
Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes.
The move is an effort by Google and Intel to extend their dominance of computing to television, an arena where they have little sway. For Sony, which has struggled to retain a pricing and technological advantage in the competitive TV hardware market, the partnership is an effort to get a leg up on competitors.Read more here.
The partners envision technology that will make it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site, as it is to change the channel.
Some existing televisions and set-top boxes offer access to Web content, but the choice of sites is limited. Google intends to open its TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for smartphones, to software developers. The company hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones.
Google is expected to deliver a toolkit to outside programmers within the next couple of months, and products based on the software could appear as soon as this summer.
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... and this one's just for fun... to prove that, despite all those newfangled high-tech tools, sometimes the old ways are the best ways...
Journalist Scoops Press and Police with Simple Google Search
(Journalism.co.uk)
Danish police had been searching for Rumenian murder suspect Marian Clita for a good 24 hours when Norwegian journalist Andreas Lunde Googled him, found his phone number and got him on the line.
In a scoop that almost beggars belief, ABC Nyheter’s Andreas Lunde, tracked down the man wanted for the brutal murder of Norwegian Scandinavian Airline stewardess Vera Vildmyren in Copehnhagen, a man sought by both the police and the press, with a simple Google Search.Read the whole story here.
“I found a blog post he had commented on, using his name and phone number when doing so, put the Rumenian land code in front of the number and called,” Lunde told Danish TV2 News.
Clita picked up the phone, confirmed he was indeed Marian Clita, professed to be unaware the police was searching for him, but, when asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, said he would get a taxi to the police station in ten minutes – and kept his word.
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