AOL continues to pour money into its Patch.com “hyperlocal” news venture, and is also rolling out a Huffington Post-style aggregation effort called Local Voices aimed at pulling in local bloggers. But can any of this help AOL dig itself out of the financial hole it’s in? Read more »
Anyone who posts early results during Monday’s federal election in Canada could be fined $25,000 or sentenced to five years in prison, according to an ancient provision in the country’s Election Act — but some Twitter users have said they will defy the ban anyway. Read more »
While many would like to give credit to Twitter for breaking the news about Osama bin Laden, this isn’t about Twitter vs. media — it’s about the reality of a new ecosystem of news, one in which Twitter and Facebook play an extremely powerful role. Read more »
OnSwipe founder and CEO Jason Baptiste says apps are good for some things, but when it comes to publishing content, “they suck.” So the startup gives publishers the same features as an app, but using the web — and it wants to do that for advertisers too. Read more »
At the Activate conference in New York, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark talked about his work with non-profits and his views on the importance of a free press, and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Lawrence Lessig talked about his efforts to fight corruption with a project called Rootstrikers. Read more »
YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired Delicious, but it sounds like they have something much bigger in mind than just maintaining the service. So what could Delicious become? The key is information discovery, one of the meatiest problems in media right now. 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 »
Author and media consultant Jeff Jarvis has come up with a breakdown of what he calls some “hard economic lessons for news,” and it makes for somewhat gloomy reading indeed. That said, however, there are some glimmers of hope amid the murk and despair. Read more »
The New York Times’ latest financial results are a snapshot of a traditional media giant that is trying desperately to move into the digital future, but keeps getting dragged back down by the weight of its legacy businesses, whose health continues to decline. Read more »
News.me, which grew out of an experiment by the New York Times, and Trove — which is backed by the Washington Post — have very different takes on customizing the news and making it social, but both are part of a growing trend towards personalized media. Read more »
Amazon is launching a Kindle lending program for libraries, and while there are some interesting features included, the plan raises questions about who controls the content in these books, and what happens if Amazon or its publishers change their minds about the terms of the deal. Read more »
Apps like Flipboard and Zite are showing traditional media entities what readers really want when it comes to mobile content consumption: smart aggregation, customization and personalization, and a better interface. If publishers don’t find a way to ride that wave, they will be crushed by it. Read more »
If there’s one thing The Huffington Post does better than just about any other media entity, it’s take advantage of social media — and the site has just rolled out some new features that traditional publishers and media entities could learn some useful lessons from. Read more »
Demand Media says the latest changes to Google’s algorithm aren’t a big deal, even though they pushed its eHow unit down by as much as 65 percent, according to some estimates — but the reality is that Google is both Demand’s biggest partner and its biggest threat. Read more »
For anyone trying to understand why bloggers would give their content for free to a site like The Huffington Post — which is being sued by contributors for as much as $100 million — here’s a related question: Why do some programmers choose to create open-source software? Read more »
Web 2.0 has grown up and is calling in the lawyers. A blogger for The Huffington Post has launched a class-action arguing that writers — who agreed to provide content without pay — should get a share of the $315 million it got from AOL. Read more »
Hitwise data shows the New York Times has seen traffic fall by 5 to 15 percent a day since it put up a pay wall. That may not seem like much, but it’s a significant drop, and it reinforces the risks in such a strategy. 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 »
Advertising agency titan Sir Martin Sorrell was recently asked by BusinessWeek what the media industry needs to do in order to survive in these difficult times, but unfortunately for anyone hoping to be enlightened, his advice — paywalls, consolidation and government subsidies — is almost completely wrong. Read more »
The mass defection of the Engadget staff to a site run by SB Nation does two things — reinforces how SB Nation could become a major player in the media space, and shines a spotlight on one of the major weaknesses in AOL’s growth plans. Read more »
Former Valleywag editor Owen Thomas is joining a web-based media startup called The Daily Dot, co-founded by Nova Spivack and Valley PR guy Josh Jones-Dilworth. Details about what the site will do are vague, Thomas admitted in an interview, but it will be about online communities. Read more »
News-reading app maker Zite has been threatened by a group of traditional media outlets who allege it’s guilty of copyright infringement for reformatting their content. Instead of sending legal threats, those publishers should try to learn what Zite is offering readers that they aren’t. Read more »
Managing a mix of iPads, iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs, MacBooks, etc., all from the same iTunes Account can a be a rewarding, but tricky affair. Here are some things to keep in mind when setting up multiple Apple products with a single iTunes Account. Read more »
As a publishing medium, Twitter’s strength is that it is inherently democratic, but a new study looking at how information is propagated through the network shows that a relatively small group of celebrities, organizations and media influencers is still responsible for a majority of the content. Read more »
The fact that the Google Books settlement has been rejected puts the spotlight back where it should be: on the fact that Google is doing nothing wrong, legally or morally, in scanning books without the permission of the authors or the publishers of those books. Read more »
A startup called Color has raised a whopping $41 million from a group of funds including Sequoia Capital. Is the company’s photo-sharing app worth that much? Probably not. The funding is likely just a bet that the team involved will eventually come up with something worthwhile. Read more »
Mining terabytes of data isn’t just for service providers — media companies are also trying to make use of the oceans of information they have about their users to come up with better ways of recommending news to them, says Bloomberg Digital head Kevin Krim. Read more »
Hyper-local site EveryBlock started out as an automated news aggregator, pulling in feeds based on specific locations. But founder Adrian Holovaty says he has realized that data is nothing without human interaction, and so the site has relaunched with more of a focus on community. Read more »
Yes, the New York Times pay plan is confusing — but the biggest problem with the subscription idea is that it is fundamentally backward-looking. It feels like a defensive move to buy some time while the paper figures out what it wants to be. Read more »
AOL has made the acquisition of The Huffington Post sound like a nice add-on for its existing content business, but the reality is that AOL had to do something dramatic, since traffic has been plummeting and losses increasing at some of its major media properties. Read more »
With just a few paragraphs about the evils of aggregation and the rise of the Huffington Post, in which he talks about aggregators as “pirates,” the executive editor of the New York Times manages to say volumes about how little he understands where media is now. Read more »
In its latest attempt to build social-networking features into its business, soon-to-be-public LinkedIn today launched a news recommendation service called LinkedIn Today, which it hopes will function like a specialized Twitter for business networks. But will it convince people to spend more time on the network? Read more »
Stumbleupon, which was reborn as a recommendation-and-discovery service in 2009 after an earlier ill-fated acquisition by eBay, produced another tangible sign of that rebirth today with the news that the company has landed a Series B financing round of $17 million from a group of funds. Read more »
A new iPad app called Zite is the latest entrant in the race to build the “Daily Me,” a personalized newspaper that learns what you like. No one has really won this race yet, although Flipboard appears to be leading — and where is Google? Read more »
If there’s one thing websites love, it’s analytical tools that show who comes to their site and what they do when they get there. Now they can get that from Facebook too, thanks to some new tools based on the network’s “like” buttons and comments. Read more »
As the financial screws continue to tighten on traditional media companies, more and more are choosing to throw their eggs into the basket labelled “paywall” — including the New York Times. But in the long run, these walls are really just sandbags against a rising tide. Read more »
The secret to online success for newspapers doesn’t depend on technology or even specific kinds of content, says Emily Bell, the former head of digital for The Guardian. All it requires is a firm commitment to be “of the web, not just on the web.” Read more »
What news consumers really need is some way to filter all the information they can pull in and have new content recommended to them, but despite some new entrants like News360, social networks like Twitter and Facebook have so far proven to be the best solution. Read more »
Making the transition from print publishing to being digital-first media outlets hasn’t been easy for newspapers — in fact, many have stubbornly resisted this change, and tried to dip their toes into digital waters gradually. But incremental changes are not helping them adapt to the new reality. Read more »
