The BBC has issued a new directive to its journalists telling them they must post updates to editors first rather than breaking news on Twitter, another example of how traditional media entities are struggling with their relationship to Twitter in an era of real-time, distributed news. Read more »
The New York Times has signed up over 300,000 people to its digital subscription plan, but that doesn’t even come close to making up for continued declines in ad revenue. A new CEO is going to have to think creatively about where the paper goes now. Read more »
The firestorm of criticism that erupted over the New York Times public editor’s question about whether reporters should be “truth vigilantes” is a sign there is still a huge gap between what the mainstream media thinks its job is and what readers think. Read more »
A spokesman for the board that oversees the Pulitzer Prize awards for journalism says live reporting of a news event using Twitter would not qualify for a Pulitzer unless it also appeared on a traditional news website. But does that definition fit how journalism works now? Read more »
Contrary to the concerns expressed by the Washington Post’s ombudsman, the last thing the Post — or any newspaper — needs to worry about is whether it’s moving too quickly. If anything, the pace of change in media is speeding up rather than slowing down. Read more »
Some newspaper websites made a little ground with their paywall strategies over the past year. But the media industry should be very careful about over-interpreting the successes of a handful over the struggles of the multitude. Read more »
A new study of the way information flowed during the Arab Spring uprisings earlier this year paints a fascinating picture of how what some call “news as a process” works, and the roles bloggers, mainstream media and others play during a breaking news event. Read more »
Social media sites like Facebook have been criticized as catering to users’ own deluded senses of self-importance, but a current lawsuit against Facebook might prove social media users are important. Within circles of friends, in fact, users might be considered celebrities–which has big legal implications. Read more »
In the wake of an Oregon court ruling that decided a blogger wasn’t a journalist, some have argued it’s more important to define what journalism is — but in many ways, that’s even harder to define than who qualifies to be a journalist. Read more »
The case of “investigative blogger” Crystal Cox reinforces that some governments are lagging behind when it comes to extending freedom-of-the-press protections to non-traditional journalists like bloggers. When anyone can be a journalist, how do we decide who gets protection and who doesn’t? Read more »
The board that administers the Pulitzer prizes for journalism has changed the criteria for the breaking news category to stress the real-time nature of the reporting involved — which suggests that some day a Pulitzer might be awarded for live-tweeting of a news event. Read more »
The authorities in New York are discovering what Egypt also learned — that it’s not as easy to regulate or arrest journalists when everyone is a journalist. But while that may make our lives a little more complicated, it is fundamentally a good thing for society. Read more »
In another sign that it doesn’t really understand the evolution of media in the age of Twitter, the Associated Press has admonished its journalists for posting news about their own arrests to Twitter instead of saving that information for its traditional wire service. Read more »
A writer at the Columbia Journalism Review has taken aim at what he sees as the real reason for the media industry’s problems: “future of news” visionaries, who he says are hurting more than they are helping. But is that really where the problem lies? Read more »
Associated Press says its journalists shouldn’t express opinions on Twitter, and some are recommending reporters modify the way they retweet to avoid giving the impression they agree. But all that’s really required is that we stop pretending journalists don’t have opinions in the first place. Read more »
Google is adding author images and information to Google News search results, but only if writers have Google+ profiles. Is the web giant trying to help journalists get discovered more easily, or has it crossed the line by promoting its own social network over others? Read more »
In the wake of the sanctioning of a public-radio host for being involved in an Occupy Wall Street protest, former Slate media critic Jack Shafer says that media outlets should stop trying to force their journalists to pretend that they are soul-less robots without opinions. Read more »
At Google’s recent Zeitgeist symposium, legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel suggested that it is somehow Google’s duty to “fix” the news, and CEO Larry Page seemed to agree. But relying on Google to choose what news we should read is a very slippery slope. Read more »
In response to the upheaval in the media industry and what they see as the problems that the web has created for journalism, some are arguing that journalists should be regulated and licensed — but such solutions would create worse problems than they claim to solve. Read more »
Dave Winer says journalism as we know it is “obsolete” because everyone can do it. Is he right? Yes and no. One thing is for sure: journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your viewpoint. Read more »
Just as CNN created the 24-hours news cycle for television, Twitter has accelerated that to the point where news breaks every minute, and a tweet is almost as good as a page-one scoop for a political reporter. Not only that, but anyone can do it. Read more »
Can we find clues about the future of news and journalism in the way a link-sharing site like Reddit operates? We just might be able to — and it’s a good reminder that the replacement for mainstream news media may look very different from what we expect. Read more »
The New York Times has rolled out a site called beta620, to provide a home for all of its experimental web projects and apps. But can the paper successfully adopt the kind of beta culture that drives startups, or is the new site just a sideshow? Read more »
Everywhere around us we see evidence of chaos in the media industry. So what can be done about this state of affairs? Media analyst Clay Shirky says that it might actually be a good thing, because it will spur experimentation. Let’s hope he is right. Read more »
Using Twitter as a tool for journalism has become more and more mainstream over the past year, and the company’s launch of a media resource center and toolbox for reporters is clearly designed to stake Twitter’s claim as a journalist and media company’s best friend. Read more »
There’s been a lot of talk about “branding” and media lately, sparked in part by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten’s recent anti-branding rant, in which he said it was “ruining journalism.” But like it or not, branding is now an inescapable part of new media. Read more »
One of the themes running through many of the projects that won this year’s $5-million Knight News Challenge for media startups is the idea that data — and the ability to filter and make sense of it — can be a powerful tool for digital journalism. Read more »
London search startup Duedil already provides a one-stop shop for business information and intelligence — a service it says can make a real difference to companies and consumers. Now it’s going further, by offering investigative journalists the chance to access sensitive data more easily. Read more »
We’ve spent so long consuming the news in fairly predictable formats that the new forms of journalism we are seeing all around us can be confusing. But these new forms have the potential to broaden the field immensely, and that is a good thing. Read more »
In another example of the power of instantaneous publishing, a woman in Florida who was raped posted messages about the incident to Twitter — raising questions about how the media should handle such events, and reinforcing how the way we get our news and information is changing. Read more »
You wouldn’t think that we would still be having debates about the value of linking, but a blog post by Doc Searls about the dearth of links in newspaper stories led to a Twitter debate that shows how far some media outlets still have to go. Read more »
A young editor for Sky News puts his finger on some of the changes that are disrupting the media industry when he describes in a blog post how his job now involves interacting with “a personalized wire service” of more than 2,000 sources via Twitter. Read more »
Columbia’s school of journalism has released a report on the media industry that describes a landscape filled with disruption and confusion. Although there are some hints of possible new business models, most media companies simply don’t understand enough about what is happening to their traditional businesses. Read more »
Is the man who live-tweeted the bin Laden attack a “citizen journalist?” Some argue that he is not, but the reality is that what we call journalism is being unbundled into its component parts, and anyone can now perform some or all of those functions. Read more »
Journalism professor Jay Rosen says one of the lessons he has learned in his career is that “the more people who participate in the press, the stronger it will be.” In other words, while “crowdsourcing” can produce plenty of noise, journalism is the better for it. Read more »
Forbes media writer Jeff Bercovici says Journalism 2.0 is somehow to blame for the deaths of 24 people in Afghanistan in the wake of a Quran burning in Florida. But the story he refers to says more about Journalism 1.0 than it does about new media. Read more »
Does Facebook have Twitter envy? The latter has become a platform for real-time journalism, while Facebook is still thought of as a place where friends share photos or play games. Now the social network is reaching out to the media with new resources aimed at journalists. Read more »
A handful of new releases and partnerships this week — as well as a big award — illustrate just how versatile the data-processing tool Hadoop is and how widespread its use might become. Hadoop is becoming a more viable tool for everyone from business users to journalists. Read more »
With AOL, Demand Media and Yahoo all investing heavily in creating huge networks, “content farms” are clearly here to stay. But how far can they go? A team of journalists and computer scientists is conducting an experiment to see if the news can be completely automated. Read more »
Fans of Groupon note that it has more than 100 writers, editors and fact-checkers on staff — more than a lot of medium-sized newspapers — and is continuing to hire and train writers, many of whom are (or were) journalists. But is that really something worth celebrating? Read more »
