Exploring Media in Transformation | Transforming in Media Exploration
/ˌtrænsfərˈmeɪʃən/ n. 1: a process of change from one form to another.
Danny Sanchez (and everyone else) has the Digitial Edge Award winners. Definitely worth a click to see what's considered top flight at newspaper.coms.
My first thought: Tip of the hat to Edgie winner PolitiFact, a skillful blend of good old fashioned journalism and newfangled packaging. At the News we're subscribing to their feed.
Steve Outing gives two thumbs down to Trib CEO Sam Zell's comment that he's going to innovate in the smaller markets:
Waiting for experiments from the hinterlands to pan out before implementing them in Chicago, LA and Long Island is a going-too-slow approach.
Influential Silicon Valley VC blog Tech Crunch writes about Mochila, the content syndication company that Belo invested in. It's a mostly positive post about how the company is offering some BBC video. But - ouch - check out one of the comments, in which "Webmogul" rips the company for having bad code:
...it is the worst code I have ever seen written, period. I’ve seen bad code from IBM, Microsoft and others, and nothing compares to what these guys put out. It doesn’t scale (we tested it), is the very definition of “spaghetti code” goes against every good programming practice you can imagine. I know of at least half a dozen other people that feel that same way too.
In this post, Twitter, Jeff Jarvis explains how he's come to respect the microblogging platform as "an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging." I agree. Worth a read.
I've already mentioned the debut of Everyblock, the latest effort by Web data guru Adrian Holovaty. Now he's fleshed out some of the work behind the scenes that led to the site's recent launch, in an interview at OJR.
Adrian explains it clearly took some work in the community and on the computer. And he offers his reasons why we newspaper.commers haven't equaled his efforts.
Holovaty: Unfortunately, there's a lot. In the general case (and "general" means this excludes the newspapers out there who are doing great things online) --
- A lack of technical competence
- A culture so obsessed with daily deadlines that little thought/resources are put into paradigm changes
- A culture that disdains technology and science, particularly math, and, worse, actually takes pride in that
- Red tape
- Legacy systems
- Legacy attitudes
- People who ask "Is this journalism?" ;-)
In Databases as Entry Points to Investigative Stories, Berkeley's Paul Grabowicz says:
Taking long investigative projects written for newspapers or magazines or as TV/radio documentaries and then shoveling them online, perhaps dressed up with a little multimedia, is only jamming old media forms into a new media pipe. But understanding how to present data in an appealing way, and making that data accessible so people can mess around with it and create their own "stories," is taking advantage of what digital has to offer.
I've long advocated creating games as a way of touching an audience that wouldn't otherwise care about what we write. And we've done a few good ones at my other shops, like this taxes game.
Berkeley's Paul Grabowicz explains: Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games
Video game storytelling also challenges our traditional notions about being detached, third-person, objective observers who produce stories for passive consumption by readers and viewers.
A video game reverses that relationship - the story must be written from the perspective of the player, and the story unfolds according to what the player decides to do. A game in which you try to impose on the player a rigid linear narrative is doomed to failure.
This doesn't mean the journalist's role as storyteller goes away - you're still constructing the game world and shaping the play that exists within it.
And check out the first version of what he's putting together.
It's kind of crude, but here's a neat mashup that pastes news feeds onto a map. If we can figure out how to better tag our articles with location (such as a street address or geocode) we could really add to our relevance as people search for what matters near them.
Check out Pharmalot Starts To Tweet -- one of the other newspaper blogs in our beat blogging experiment (the one we're doing with DISD) is using Twitter to get out the word.
My best hire ever, and former colleague, Danny Sanchez, has this take on Google's recent upgrade to deliver more targeted local news:
*Tap* *Tap* Is this thing on? — WE MUST START GEOCODING STORIES. Google is starting to do it. EveryBlock is already doing it really well. Topix sorta does it. A few others are doing it too. Groups of engineers have already written scrapes that scan the text of news stories. They’ve written algorithms that detect and process addresses for geocoding. Let’s not re-hash the whole newspapers-are-always-falling-behind speech; just get moving already.
I hear you, Danny. Been shouting it myself for the last couple years. But turn the mike up, because I worry that the people who need to know don't.
A former colleague of mine in the Bay Area, Andrew Finlayson, (he's ND at Fox in Chicago now) pinged me tonight to let me know about a beta site they threw together just in the last 3 weeks.
http://www.livenewscameras.com/
It's basically a page with live streams from all their Fox TV video feeds around the country... and in the upper right he's got one staffer with a simple webcam sitting at her computer screen telling anyone who is watching which stream is 'hot' right now. She just called out to us that if we clicked on the Washington 2 feed, for instance, we'd see Hillary right now as she comes out to talk live. And I did, and I watched Hillary's speech in a window in the middle.
This is a terrific concept. Here's how Andrew described it for me:
We are aggregating all the live feeds we can get on this day. We think of this as an experiment on many levels. Is the platform stable, will the audience like it, will they come back, does unfiltered news work, can we help moderate it with a light hand, can we find more news sources to point to, does the concept expand, what does it say about democracy and the future of journalism if we can start streaming every kind of news event…politics, weather, business, etc.
A colleague did most of the programming, we sort of glued together different ideas and we thought Super Tuesday would be the perfect day to try it out.
And they did it in 3 weeks.
From Danny Sanchez:
"MySpace today unveiled a developer platform designed to facilitate the creation of third-party apps for MySpace, ala Facebook applications."
URL: MySpace unveils developer platform
As I've said on other posts, widgets are a way of distributing our news through social networks. We aren't doing that yet, but we need to start -- soon.