Former CIA staffer Edward Snowden talked about a lot of things during a live Q&A on Monday hosted by the Guardian newspaper — but there were also some important questions that he neglected to answer. Read more »
After a wave of initial shock at the revelations about NSA surveillance, there seems to be a pervasive feeling of resignation about our data being collected by the government. Have we grown too used to being spied on? Read more »
The man who leaked top-secret documents from the NSA — about a digital surveillance program called PRISM that collected data from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others — has come forward to speak about why he did it. Read more »
Berlin-based e-reading startup Readmill has added a free books section to its iOS app, and also announced partnerships with The Atavist, The Guardian and Livrada. Read more at paidContent »
The Guardian’s expansion into the U.S. is on track, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said Wednesday, with traffic up by 37 percent last year. For now, there are no plans for a paywall. Read more at paidContent »
Paywalls are being erected at hundreds of newspapers around the world, but Guardian Media CEO Andrew Miller says his newspaper is still opposed to a subscription wall because it wants to expand its readership as much as possible. Read more at paidContent »
The Guardian said Monday that it gets more than 50 percent of its traffic from mobile devices at 6 a.m. in the morning and on 3 p.m. on Saturdays. Fab.com said more than 50 percent of sales early Saturday mornings happen via mobile devices. Read more »
Critics of social media like to focus on how much fake news gets circulated during events like Hurricane Sandy, but Twitter and other services are also quick to correct those kinds of reports, and have become part of an expanding ecosystem of real-time news. Read more »
Just as Tumblr seems to be trying to imitate a mainstream media entity by hiring bloggers to cover political conventions, traditional media outlets are trying to become more Tumblr-like by adopting animated GIFs and other tools as a way of making their content more viral. Read more »
Is offering your readers membership benefits a better approach to revenue generation than putting up a hard paywall? The tech commentary site Techdirt thinks so, and has launched some interesting new features that other traditional media companies might want to pay attention to. Read more »
The recent dramatic declines in users of some Facebook social-reading apps from newspapers like the Washington Post reinforces a lesson that media companies need to keep in mind at all times — namely, that Facebook is the information gatekeeper now, and you are just a provider. Read more »
Some of the media industry’s leading “data journalists” have published a crowdsourced handbook for the practice of data-oriented journalism, including examples of some of the best projects, tips on how to hire hacker-journalists — and an argument for why data journalism could help save the media. Read more »
Is there a way for newspapers to generate revenue without a paywall? Yes. They could try to think about developing a relationship with readers that is based on mutual exchange of benefits, and let the monetization flow from that instead of just asking for a handout. Read more »
In contrast to the wave of support for paywalls that is sweeping the newspaper industry, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger says that he remains committed to practicing “open journalism,” an approach he believes is the only real option for media in the digital era. Read more »
MediaNews Group chief executive John Paton reiterated his “digital first” message in a fire-and-brimstone speech to a journalism group in Toronto recently, saying media entities of all kinds must let go of their attachment to the “information gatekeeper” model or they will surely perish. Read more »
We’ve been covering already how the Guardian’s digital-first strategy has resulted in some sections of the printed newspaper shrinking. Toda… Read more at paidContent »
NewsCred, which started off trying to filter the news for consumers based on credibility, has created what it says is the modern digital version of a traditional newswire and signed up more than 750 sources including mainstream publishers such as Forbes and The Guardian. Read more »
The Guardian is trialling a new community publishing platform that’s based on where you are — a sort of Wordpress meets Craigslist meets Everyblock. But can it make hyperlocal work? The company’s director of digital strategy tells us what it means. Read more »
Many newspapers still think of themselves as delivering content in a specific format, but some forward-thinking outlets — including USA Today and The Guardian in Britain — are thinking of themselves more as platforms, and opening up their content for use by others via their APIs. Read more »
Creating a Facebook app for your newspaper — or an iPhone app, or an app for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet — is a nice project, but real innovation consists of rethinking how a media company functions in a digital age on a more fundamental level. Read more »
The Guardian newspaper in Britain has made its clearest declaration yet that the future of the organization is online by saying it is going “digital first.” Now all it has to do is prove that this strategy can be a success financially as well as philosophically. Read more »
This evening, as we learn about the death of Osama bin Laden, we’re seeing firsthand what happens when the real-time, immediate notifications of Facebook and Twitter meet real-world events. But how do we decide what’s gossip and what is fact? Read more »
The Guardian newspaper in Britain has launched a plugin for the blog-publishing tool Wordpress that allows websites to embed the full text of Guardian news stories for free, provided they also embed the newspaper’s advertising. It is the latest step in the company’s open platform strategy. Read more »
Newspapers may not be known for being digital visionaries, but the British newspaper The Guardian is doing something pretty revolutionary: by launching its Open Platform, the company has completely rethought the fundamental nature of its business, and the way that it thinks about value creation online. Read more »
The Guardian isn’t the tech-savvy enterprise one would normally look to for guidance on digital issues or Internet-related topics. But the 190-year-old newspaper company is doing something revolutionary with its business, and it’s worth looking at what that is and what lessons other companies might be ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
