Twitter says it doesn’t have any interest in hiring reporters or performing other journalistic functions — but regardless of whether it does so, it is still a powerful media entity and one that grows stronger by the day. Read more at paidContent »
There are plenty of reasons for pessimism about the state of the media and journalism, including repeated layoffs, bankruptcies and so on. But there are also many reasons to be optimistic about the current environment. Read more at paidContent »
Whenever a breaking news event leads to errors on Twitter, critics suggest that the service needs some kind of built in correction or editing mechanism — but adding one would not only be complicated, it would also be unwise. Read more »
It may seem like a sideshow, or a service that can only bring noise and chaos to the news, but RapGenius and its approach towards annotation shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand just yet. Read more at paidContent »
Although some might expect a 17-year-old startup founder to take his windfall from a Yahoo acquisition and run, Summly CEO Nick D’Aloisio says he wants to stick around and help Yahoo figure out how mobile content works. Read more »
Are algorithms actually making society dumber? Yes, says at least one big data expert. We can’t throw computers at our problems until we better define those problems though human input. Read more »
Devices like Google Glass are going to change the way that we consume the news and other information — how will media companies have to change the way they think about the news and how it is constructed? Read more at paidContent »
When news shows rely on “viral” videos for their programming, without bothering to even try and verify whether they are real or not, all they do is push their viewers towards the original source of that content. Read more at paidContent »
After a fan posted a video of a horrific crash at a NASCAR event, the organizer removed it claiming copyright infringement, but Google over-ruled the company — an example of a decision that happens all too rarely. Read more at paidContent »
Most of the startups and networks focused on hyperlocal or community news and information try to be as open as possible, but Nextdoor is taking the exact opposite approach and making the barrier to entry for users as high as it can. Read more »
Folks already use the internet more than newspapers to get their national news. Now the internet is on the verge of toppling even TV, research sugests. Read more at paidContent »
Printed newspapers may be fading as a business because of the shift to digital media, but two incidents this week show that they still have power because of the shared experience they involve. What happens when that is replaced by thousands of online sources? Read more »
Instead of filing traditional news reports about Syria to traditional outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg, foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian decided to start her own dedicated news site about the conflict in the war-torn country — part of an ongoing trend towards the unbundling of the media. Read more »
Prismatic, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine-learning algorithms to recommend news and other content to users based on their social activity, has raised a $15-million Series A round from a star-studded group of investors including Accel Partners and Russian investor Yuri Milner. Read more »
Ex-Huffington Post execs Ken Lerer and Eric Hippeau are finally out with their social video news app NowThis News. Will younger users find it more captivating than just flipping channels, or picking off videos from a user’s social stream? Read more at paidContent »
Tthe New York Times and the Wall Street Journal lowered their paywalls in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, and a discussion about their motivation for doing so highlights the tension between the newspaper as a vehicle for public information and as a commercial entity. Read more »
Like other industries that have been disrupted by new forms of competition, Clay Christensen says that newspapers were almost incapable of taking the steps they needed to take — even long after the danger of not taking those steps had become abundantly obvious. Read more »
A new app called Circa, from Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, wants to make reading news on mobile devices easier by breaking down the traditional story format into its component parts. Co-founder Matt Galligan says the company is trying to rethink how we consume news. Read more »
New research from the Pew Center into news consumption habits shows that the impact of mobile and social continues to grow. Almost twice as many users got news from a mobile device compared with 2010, and almost three times as many got news from a social network. Read more »
News-filtering service Prismatic has just launched a new “friend following” feature. Although this may look like a social-networking copycat move, founder Brad Cross says it is all about increasing the amount of data the service has about its users so that it can make relevant recommendations. Read more »
For years Reddit has been used by journalists as a source of stories and ideas — but most outlets have preferred to keep their addiction quiet. Now, thanks in large part to President Obama, it doesn’t have to be their dirty little secret any more. Read more »
Prismatic, a news-filtering service, has launched an iPhone app that founder Bradford Cross says makes the experience of reading news on a mobile device appealing for the first time, because it strips away all of the clutter that tends to slow down mobile news sites. Read more »
Circa, the stealthy mobile news startup from Cheezburger’s Ben Huh and SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan, is trying to build a news application that is native to smartphone and tablet users. In a video interview, Huh explains what’s wrong with news today and how it needs to change. Read more at paidContent »
Rupert Murdoch’s struggling iPad newspaper The Daily is laying off 50 of 170 employees and also implementing other cost-saving measures, including decreasing opinion and sports coverage. The changes will help the publication “be more nimble editorially,” editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo said. Read more at paidContent »
Twitter is launching a partnership with NBC Universal to create a real-time news hub around the Olympic Games — the latest step in the company’s transformation into a media entity, a move that is a double-edged sword for other media outlets. Read more »
The way that communities like Reddit can come together to produce real-time reporting on incidents like the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater shows how a new form of journalism — one that blends traditional reporting and crowdsourced reports — is starting to take shape. Read more »
Piano Media, the digital news payments kiosk through which several Slovenian and Slovakian publishers have begun charging for some of their content, is opening shop in its third country, Poland, as paidContent speculated last month. Six publishers (Agora, Murator, Polskapresse, Media Regionalne, Edytor and Axel Springer-Ringier) […] Read more at paidContent »
Comparing a traditional news story about a recent shooting with a news report from a Reddit user — who pulled together Twitter messages from the perpetrators and victims — provides a glimpse of what a real-time, crowdsourced newsroom of the future might look like. Read more »
Paying for online news is still a minority sport – but participation may be growing thanks to tablet computers. Read more at paidContent »
The arrival of the iPhone five years ago changed many things, but one of the most fundamental was the way that news and journalism are delivered and consumed — and at the same time, it also revolutionized the way that news content is created. Read more »
Google and Amazon have applied for dozens of new top-level domains — including .blog and .book, as well as .search and .cloud — and many of these will be for the exclusive use of the two companies, which critics say is bad for the web. Read more »
Growing online subscriptions and still-falling print circulation mean the 227-year-old newspaper nicknamed ‘The Thunderer’ could soon be consumed more in pixels than in ink. Read more »
In an interview about the future of the media industry, Google’s head of news products Richard Gingras said that newspapers are like old-fashioned internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo, and that unless they can adapt to the web instead of fighting it they are doomed. 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 »
The Economist’s CEO thinks news publishing will be all-digital at some point in the near- to mid-term. But he sees services like Flipboard re-using his content to take its revenue along the way. Read more at paidContent »
The Chicago Tribune has laid off most of its hyper-local unit and hired what some describe as a “content farm,” while other outlets are using content that is generated by algorithms. Is this the future of news, and if so should we be happy about it? Read more »
The internet is supposed to be about the end of intermediaries. Then why are middlemen so successful? For years, aggregators have ruled the content space and now a new breed of brokers is using technology to redefine the interaction between readers and publishers. Read more at paidContent »
The curious case of the missing citizen news site. Where is the new service that China’s Twitter-beating microblog operator launched to give news organisations anonymous tips? Read more at paidContent »
Read It Later is making its app completely free — no more premium version — and renaming it Pocket to express the fact that users can save any type of content, not just articles. Read more at paidContent »
China’s Communist Party is doing a good impression of a Silicon Valley news startup, as it floats its official newspaper’s web operation to finance catching up commercial services. Read more at paidContent »
