Posts tagged news
“ Local news outlets get less than one half of one percent of all pageviews in a typical market”
News.me: Leave the house, download news
This is my favorite use of iOS’s background geofencing yet:
I’ll think we’ve all been there: you get into a subway car, and just as the doors are closing, you realize that you’ve forgotten to take your phone out, pull to refresh, and wait 10 seconds to download the latest news articles to read offline. You curse under your breath and switch back to Angry Birds.
Today we’re pleased to introduce a new feature called Paper Boy. Simply set your home location so that whenever you leave home, News.me downloads your latest news in the background.
The best part about this? It’s such a clever, simple solution I imagine all serious news apps (cough-Instapaper-cough) will implement this feature shortly. Suddenly background downloading is no longer the domain of Newsstand bound apps. Hats off to Rob Haining for this sharp hack.
“ When Wolfgang Schäuble proposed that Greece should postpone its elections as a condition for further help, I knew that the game would soon be up. We are at the point where success is no longer compatible with democracy. The German finance minister wants to prevent a “wrong” democratic choice. Similar to this is the suggestion to let the elections go ahead, but to have a grand coalition irrespective of the outcome. The eurozone wants to impose its choice of government on Greece – the eurozone’s first colony.”
Wolfgang Münchau says Greece must default if it wants democracy. When an FT columnist calls a German-led bailout “unethical” and an attempt to “insulate the government from the outcome of democratic processes”, we should probably take note.
Münchau reasons that German moves are part of an effort to encourage Greek’s exit from the Euro:
Mistrust is the reason why the Greek rescue package has been delayed until the latest possible moment, and why the latest proposals contain so many poison pills: implementation deadlines, the escrow account, and a permanent representation of creditors and the International Monetary Fund. Soon there will be yet more austerity. At some point, somebody will snap.
The German strategy seems to be to make life so unbearable that the Greeks themselves will want to leave the eurozone.
(Via The FT)
The Economist: Why Jeremy Lin Matters in China
One of the reasons I love the Economist is their news cycle duration: a weekly rhythm allows them to absorb and then thoughtfully weigh in on viral subjects, which tend to carry lots of noise as they emerge. This piece on Jeremy Lin is a prime example:
Mr Lin has quickly amassed a huge following among Chinese basketball fans (and this country does love basketball). This poses a bit of a conundrum for Chinese authorities for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that Mr Lin is an American who is proudly of Taiwanese descent, which would seem to complicate China’s efforts to claim him (and oh how they have tried already—on which, more below).
But there are three other reasons Mr Lin’s stardom could fluster the authorities. First, he is very openly Christian, and the Communist Party is deeply wary of the deeply religious (notably on those within its own ranks). Second, he is not a big centre or forward, the varietals which are the chief mainland Chinese export to the NBA, including the Mavericks’ Mr Yi; and of course he came out of nowhere to become a star, having been educated at the most prestigious university in America, Harvard.
Mr Lin is, put plainly, precisely everything that China’s state sport system cannot possibly produce.
The whole thing is a great read, especially when paired with the Economist’s previous piece on China’s failure to field a decent football team.
Content Creep Check-In: Salon’s Record Numbers
A few days ago I noted the continuing erosion of “content” based businesses; businesses that use page views and revenue, not quality, to gauge their output.
But enough of the Demand Media deathwatch, today we have some good news: Salon has turned themselves around by focusing on quality first. Kerry Lauerman, editor in chief of Salon, explains how Salon achieved a record year in 2011 and sees trends continuing in January:
We’ve also — completely against the trend — slowed down our process. We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic. [emphasis mine]
What makes this all the more impressive is that only few years ago Salon was making the standard metric-centric decisions which lead to the content-crunch:
A few years ago, as Salon (like all publications), tried to right our ship in deeply troubled recessionary waters, we followed the familiar script of other sites — we laid off terrific staffers to lower our costs; we brutally pared down our expenses; we revamped staff priorities so that writers could simply produce more; we experimented in a fair amount of low-calorie aggregation. And yes, there’s that word: Aggregation, the most inflammatory (and sometimes, hilarious) in our industry… At its worst, we monitored Twitter and Google for trending topics, and dispatched an intern to cobble together our own summary of it, posted it quickly, then prayed to the Google gods that the effort would win, if only briefly, their favor.
Congratulations are in order to Lauerman and his team. It’s great to see Lauerman and Salon’s founder/CEO David Talbot betting on quality and succeeding. (Via Kerry Lauerman)
“ Can you diagnose an audio recorder malfunction over a bad phone line to Tehran?”
“ The ruling on whether she was a journalist in the eyes of the law turned out to be a MacGuffin, a detail that was very much beside the point. She didn’t so much report stories as use blogging, invective and search engine optimization to create an alternative reality. Journalists who initially came to her defense started to back away when they realized they weren’t really in the same business.”
David Carr, writing at NYTimes.com.
I vote we swap the term “citizen journalist” for simply “reporter.” Everyone can (and should) report. The word “journalist” should be reserved to imply rigorous verification, editorial abilities, and other diligence that isn’t employed when one posts a picture to Twitter.
Don’t think I look down on the idea of everyone reporting. It’s game changing and empowering. But I think the term “citizen journalist” over promises the capabilities of individuals and trivializes the work that goes into journalism.
The ability of everyone to report is so important we shouldn’t hide it behind a buzzword which can be taken down by what it over promises.
The NYT on the NYPD's Tactics Against Reporters
More than anything else surrounding OWS, this trend is what worries me most:
Over several days, New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers.
Reporters with The Associated Press and The Daily News were arrested while taking notes. A radio reporter was arrested as she recorded several blocks from the park.
All of this behavior “allegedly” occurred “on the streets of New York.”
This is the point in articles where it is customary to aver: the Police Department has done a fine, historic job battling crime. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is a brilliant tactician, and he deserves much credit. That is true.
Another truth co-exists. At least since the Republican National Convention of 2004, our police have grown accustomed to forcibly penning, arresting, and sometimes spraying and whacking protesters and reporters. On Monday, The New York Times and 12 other organizations sent a letter of protest to the Police Department. “The police actions of last week,” the authors said, “have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.”
Their letter offered five examples. I’ll mention one: As the police carried off a young protester whose head was covered in a crown of blood, a photographer stood behind a metal barricade and raised his camera. Two officers ran at him, grabbed the barrier and struck him in the chest, knees and shins. You are not permitted, the police yelled, to photograph on the sidewalk.
Covering New York can be a contact sport. We grunt, curse and toss elbows. I’ve run across the Brooklyn Bridge as protesters tossed bottles at cops, stood inside illegal squats on the Lower East Side as police massed outside, and walked through Crown Heights as communal tensions exploded. The rough rule was this: Treat cops reasonably and you can go about your business of recording and bearing witness. Those feel like ancient days.
Thank god for cheap, ubiquitous cameras.
There’s hegemonic tension bubbling between governments’ desire to constantly document us and their desire that we not document them. (Via NYT)
Getty photographer Philippe Desmazes captured this iconic image of the man who claims to have shot Gaddafi brandishing the Colonel’s gun. The BBC writes:
A fighter in Sirte has told the BBC his account of the reported capture. Mohammed, a young fighter in his 20s, wearing a blue T-shirt and a New York Yankees baseball cap, said he had found the colonel hiding in a hole in the ground in the city of Sirte. He told the BBC that the former Libyan leader said to him simply: “Don’t shoot”.
(Via NYMag)
SplatF Gets Rejected From Google News
As Dan Frommer points out, this is bullshit. But then again, Google News itself is mostly bullshit.
I’ve ripped them again and again and again for various things that a service serious about severing up the best news to its readers should care about. And I’ve spoken with that team a number of times behind the scenes about other issues. Nothing ever gets fiBlackwaterd. In fact, it often gets worse.
Especially ridiculous since aggregating, filtering, and subscribing on the individual journalist level should be the killer feature of Google News. What a waste.
(I’m still pissed a service that rips and republishes content doesn’t expose an API…)
