The annual awards that identify the most innnovative digital journalism conferred on The Gray Lady a some big-ticket bling. the Batten Award for Innovation. NYT scooped up the $10,000 first prize for six "striking entries:"
Represent, which helps city residents keep tabs on their elected officials, culling information from dozens of sources into a Facebook-style activity feed.
Document Reader, which allows documents to be posted online in a clean interface that allows searching, bookmarking, comments and annotations.
Custom Times, a prototype for personalized Times news reports that seamlessly transition across print, Web, mobile, television and even the car.
Debate Analysis Tool, a replicable tool that allowed users to watch the 2008 presidential debates and speeches on demand with a searchable transcript scrolling simultaneously alongside.
Living with Less, engaging audio and video portraits of peoples’ lives that have been upended by the recession.
One Word, a replicable tool that asked users on Election Day to share “What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?“
I'm not surprised. The Times started investing in digital innovators a couple years back and it's been obvious for months that they've hit their stride. As I noted earlier this year, they figured out how to cut through the technical and bureaucratic limitations that big newspapers are famous for and proved that the MSM can do digital right.
Congratulations.
You haven't heard about it in the journalism trade press. You didn't see images on the design blogs. They haven't debated it on the business 2.0 sites. Maybe it's because we didn't invest in whizbang technology, dismantle our newsroom or hire Rob Curley. But the Dallas Morning News has launched a serious effort to cover news in 15 neighborhoods and towns in our region, using seasoned reporters, community home pages, aggregation tools, staff blogs and citizen input.
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By now you've probably seen the spiffy video produced by the Chicago Tribune about its soon-to-be-launched blogging/aggregation site ChicagoNow. They're dealing with the foray of Huffington Post and ESPN into their market, plus the drip drip of social networking sites like facebook eating into their core franchise.
It's only a matter of time before this happens here in Dallas too.
So give the Trib staff credit: They dreamed this up in December and have clearly executed in a coordinated fashion across the entire company toward a defined goal. They have taken the time to create the business plan, hone the editorial concept, build the technology, design the Web 2.0 interface, aggregate the voices and develop a marketing pitch. So it's a good play, well executed, by the way it looks from the outside.
That's how news organizations need to act if they've got a prayer of survival.
Know any companies which could use a dose of that kind of business discipline?
I recently attended a two-day brainstorming session in Reno at the University of Nevada School of Journalism as a representative of the Online News Association. Our leaders were the IDEO company, which is a well-known, Palo Alto based design consultancy.
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Check out the engrossing article about the NYT's newsroom Web geeks. They're engaging in R&D every day -- able to cut across the bureaucracy that slows down innovation at papers everywhere.
Key to their effort are the following ingredients:
- Resources -- a 10 person journo-developer team plus an R&D lab
- Mandate -- they can cut across existing lines of authority to get things done and they're empowered to take risks
- Vision -- they understand and respect the journalistic brand of the NYT and yet know how to project that in new ways
Wow.
(Thanksfor the tip, Bruce Tomaso.)
Check out, rate and review finalists for the "We Media Game Changer Awards" at gamechangers.wemedia.com. From the news release:
Digital journalism from Iraq, a mobile news project from Kenya, two social networks, two digital artists, two science research collaboratives, two foundations and two online advertising marketplaces are among 35 finalists for the 2009 We Media Game Changer Awards. The awards recognize people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media.
There were no oracles at ONA08 this year, but five Dallas Morning News reporters and editors heard a number of enlightening ideas that we might put into practice as we transition to a digital future. Surprisingly, many of the takeaways centered on changing our culture, not tools or technology.
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Kent Fischer addresses that in Something has to give to innovate on the Web, as he talks about what he's had to give up to do the DISD blog.
Yes, you make your day longer but you also stop doing stuff you did before. For me, the trade off is the enterprise reporting. Not every reporter is going to want to give that up, because generally that’s the fun, stimulating stuff. But for me, that’s what got dropped given the ridiculous amounts of daily news produced in a huge city school district that needs reporting.
From Beatblogging.org:
The Listening Post, Wired's multi-author music blog, joined Twitter a few days ago and promises to use Twitter to deliver micro-posts of information to music fans.
Jennifer Okamoto, our crack Web editor for Lifestyles at The Dallas Morning News penned this note today:
This weekend, I got to spend some time on my favorite website, TED.com, where I watched this video by Jonathan Harris, an artist and computer scientist who reorganizes the information we post on the web in unusual ways. In it, he explains two projects he’s working on.
One is We Feel Fine, which searches blogs for the phrase “I feel” and organizes every sentence with that phrase by emotion, age, location and more. The site offers an interesting look at the global mood at any given moment. (Right this second: lucky, panicky and fat.)
Another is Universe, which turns current events into constellations of words, which you can sort by person, event, place, etc. For example, see at a glance who Bill Clinton was talking with in a given week, where he was, and that he took Saturday off.
Both are cool, but even better is that it helps me understand our work as singular points of data, and the interesting ways that data can be used. So when you blog, fill in those keyword and category blanks. Make sure your headline is SEO friendly. Who knows how your words could be used to help people out there?
NYT is pursuing its 'get our content anywhere' strategy in a new way --Cyberjournalist.net reports, New York Times to create open API.
Not to soundall I-told-you-so about it, but last week I was discussing how we need to leverage a taxonomy to make this easy to do. Then, we give developers a key that allows them to mash up our articles to create whatever they want. Maybe someone wants to display articles on a timeline or rank articles by emotional score (that they calculate, not us) or, heck, set our headlines to music (maybe headlines that match the top 40 song that was popular when the article published) who knows?
Here's a cool mashup, for instance. The Times Machine. Just announced, it's the Times' historical photographic archives. (The Times did this mashup on their own.)
Of great importance, monetizing this becomes interesting. We could collect a little fee for every API call.
You've probably seen that the much-anticipated second annual Knight News Challenge awards have been handed out. And the big news has this headline: World Wide Web inventor gets Knight grant.
Tim Berners-Lee's grant aims to do something with tagging (yes, think metadata) that we've needed for a long time: Create a way to sort out credible news from the rest of the stuff. Here's how the plan is sketched out by Knight:
The public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.
My third post today on why journalists should use Twitter. Click this link.
It's becoming an Anthony Moor rant.
UNDERSTAND TWITTER OR DIE.
;-)
OMG, at The case for using Twitter, here are more testimonials, from actual reporters about why journalists should consider Twitter as a new tool for covering a beat. If you are a reporter and you are reading this click the link, please.
If you work for me (and you know who you are) I suggest you start playing with Twitter now, because we need to be there.
In Überpedia lives, Jeff Jarvis talks about how the German publisher Bertelsmann is creating a 'vetted' version of some of Wikipedia. We've been wondering whether there's a need for a Dallasopedia. Here's a great way to get it done efficiently: Take what's there and make it better.
There are plenty of new startups looking to make life easier; many have merit, but here’s a few tips to help you know what’s going on from Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch: Tracking Web 2.0.
Danny Sanchez reports that, "audio from the Future of Web Apps Miami conference is available. For us online news types, these talks are a great chance to get exposed to what’s happening in web technology and to think about how we can apply it to our situation."
Agreed. Click the URL to get specific links to things like Twitter, OpenSocial and how to use passion in growing a community: Audio from Future of Web Apps Miami available.