News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch’s comments about piracy reinforce the sense that the billionaire media and entertainment mogul doesn’t understand how content works in a digital era, and that he is continuing to try and impose the scarcity that media companies have had in the past. 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 »
With new changes that offer personalized search results — most of which are being taken from its own Google+ social network — Google has just made social connections and links the new search-engine optimization strategy, and media companies need to learn how to adapt to that. Read more »
Many traditional journalists see “citizen journalism” as a negative thing, an untrustworthy source of information that diminishes their role as gatekeepers of the news — but New York Times foreign correspondent and author Nick Kristof says that he sees the value of the phenomenon. 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 »
The Associated Press and a consortium of major media owners such as the New York Times have launched a “news registry” called NewsRight. The entity says it is about tracking and licensing content, but where will it draw the line on “over-aggregation” and fair use principles? Read more »
The Philadelphia Media Network has launched a tech incubator and the Digital First Media chain have both announced plans to invest in startups. While both of these efforts may fail, it’s nice to see traditional media companies doing something other than simply putting up a paywall. Read more »
Amazon has been taking a beating recently for what some see as its attempt to cut in on the business of independent booksellers, and for its ongoing disruption of the e-book market via its Kindle lending library and other moves. But whether the traditional publishing industry […] Read more »
The Huffington Post is facing new accusations that its writers “steal” content from other media outlets by aggregating it. Not only are these charges argubly untrue, but content companies that complain about this kind of “over-aggregation” are missing the point about how news works now. Read more »
Paywalls are all the rage for media companies, but they have the unfortunate effect of penalizing an outlet’s most loyal readers. Why not try to come up with ways to reward those users for their engagement, instead of hitting them with a cash grab? Read more »
New York Times CEO Janet Robinson recently stepped down from her post, and industry sources say she was asked to resign because she didn’t do enough on the digital side. Here are five suggested areas that a new CEO of the newspaper should focus on. 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 »
Traditional media companies — and independent artists — can learn a lot from the success of comedian Louis CK’s self-produced standup special, which he offered for download at $5 a copy without any digital-rights management protection. The project paid for itself in less than a day. Read more »
Bottlenose, a new web-based service that launched Tuesday and was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack, joins a growing number of apps and services aimed at filtering the noise out of our social-media streams. But does Bottlenose have what it takes to do the job? Read more »
Can BuzzFeed turn itself from a silly meme-generator into a serious media outlet by hiring journalists like Politico writer Ben Smith? If the meteoric rise of the Huffington Post has shown us anything, it’s that new media entities can spring from the most unlikely of sources. 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 »
A new commenting system at the New York Times has drawn fire from readers, but the motivation for the move is sound. If media companies want to behave like communities (which they should), they need to encourage their readers to “level up” and become more engaged. 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 »
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 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 testimony on new anti-piracy legislation, Google’s policy counsel argued the payment blockade against WikiLeaks was a good example of how copyright infringement could be handled. But that blockade is a disturbing attack on freedom of the press — is that really something Google wants to support? 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 »
New laws such as the Stop Online Piracy Act threaten to give new powers to Congress and to content companies, and have serious implications for the web — they make it clear that content companies are in many ways fundamentally opposed to the way the internet works. Read more »
A new report from the Pew Research Center on mainstream media outlets and Twitter shows that the vast majority simply broadcast links to their own content. By doing so, unfortunately, they are missing out on many of the things that can make social media so powerful. 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 »
A New York Times piece argues WikiLeaks is on life support, but the reality is that it and Julian Assange have been the targets of a sustained attack by the U.S. government, and that is a freedom of speech issue we should all be concerned about. Read more »
More newspapers are rolling out paywalls, with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Canada’s PostMedia network the latest to jump on the bandwagon. But while they may have been encouraged by the New York Times, even that paper’s experience shows that a paywall is still a sandbag strategy. 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 »
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 »
A new report on tablet usage found that more than half of those surveyed use their devices to read the news, and they are reading more than they used to — but many of the sources they are using are non-traditional, and few are willing to pay. 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 »
James Erwin had a writer’s dream come true when a story he wrote in response to a question on a Reddit forum was optioned by Warner Brothers for a movie. But who owns the rights to the idea that Erwin just sold to the studio? Read more »
Yahoo is in turmoil, as vulture funds circle the company. Co-founder Jerry Yang says he doesn’t want to sell, and there are reports he is looking at taking the company private — which might be the best thing to happen to Yahoo in a long time. Read more »
Google has already disrupted plenty of markets — search and online advertising being just two of them — and is trying hard to disrupt many others, including mobile. So why is the company so backward when it comes to the way it treats the online news business? Read more »
The Guardian says it’s now going to experiment with allowing readers to help decide what news to cover. The paper announced Monday that it’s going to make its “newslist” public, following the idea that if readers are part of the process, they’ll be more engaged. Read more »
A presentation at the recent Society for News Design conference imagined a future in which real-time updates about a news event would be shown in heads-up displays on picture frames, windshields and even eyeglasses. But would this make our information-overload problem better or worse? Read more »
AOL has said it remains committed to rolling out its Patch.com network of a thousand hyperlocal news outlets across the U.S., but reports about cost-cutting efforts raise the question of how long the troubled former web giant can maintain that commitment to its money-losing hyperlocal project. Read more »
The products created by Apple and its founder Steve Jobs have revolutionized a host of different industries in the past couple of decades, from personal computing to mobile telephony. But they have also had a substantial impact on the way we consume media of all kinds. 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 »
