The Guardian and blogger/journalist Glenn Greenwald shocked the U.S. and much of the world with their stories about government surveillance, scoops that may have come about in part due to their outsider status in U.S. media circles. Read more »
Twitter has signed another global partnership with one of the world’s largest advertising firms, aimed at allowing the company’s clients to target their ads to specific Twitter users based on their behavior on the network. Read more at GigaOM »
Social media and tools like Twitter have come under fire during real-time news events because critics say they spread misinformation — but in places like Istanbul they can be a lifeline when the traditional media is ineffective. Read more »
Sources of all kinds — including politicians — can become publishers and distribute their own information directly to an audience, without the need for a traditional media outlet. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for journalism? Read more »
If the media is being disrupted in many of the same ways that the automotive manufacturing industry has been, who would qualify as the most innovative or disruptive force in the media business over the last decade? Read more »
Newspaper companies might not want to think of their business as being similar to industrial manufacturing like the car industry, but in many ways it is — and they can learn from what other manufacturers have been through. Read more »
The Chicago Sun-Times’ decision to lay off its entire staff of 28 photographers was widely criticized as a knee-jerk response by clueless managers, but the fact remains that newspaper cost structures are too high, and crowdsourcing works. Read more »
The Wall Street Journal has said it is planning to launch a LinkedIn-style social network for readers, and Bloomberg appears to be launching (or relaunching) one as well — but is this really what their readers or users want? Read more »
The departure of Thomson Reuters’ social-media editor sparked a debate about whether the position as we know it is dead or dying — but while those jobs may be evolving, the skills involved are more necessary than ever. Read more »
The Guardian has gotten a fair amount of ribbing on Twitter for opening a coffee shop in London, but the venture is just another element in the newspaper’s attempt to open up its journalism and engage more with its readers. Read more »
According to multiple reports, media mogul Barry Diller is looking to unload his stake in Newsweek magazine. Is the title’s brand irreparably damaged, or could a new owner revitalize it? Here are a few suggestions. Read more »
With the proliferation of new publishing platforms — and not just blogs or social networks, but also all-digital publishers like Medium, LinkedIn and the Huffington Post — how does a writer decide where they should put their work? Read more »
Social platforms like YouTube have become a rich source of “citizen journalism” about breaking news events, but media outlets don’t always provide credit. Mark Little of Storyful wants to try and change that with a public license for video news. Read more »
Journalism has been evolving away from just a repetition of facts or events and towards context and analysis, research shows — but this evolution has also created tension for media companies because it conflicts with the principle of objectivity. Read more »
The New York Times’ legal response to a startup whose software allows publishers to replicate the look of the NYT’s Snow Fall feature goes so far above and beyond a simple cease-and-desist it becomes ridiculous. Read more »
Comment trolls are often used as an example of why blog comments are a waste of time, but a recent series by the Climate Desk showed how they can quickly be turned into human beings. Read more »
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says that many of the cultural barriers to doing “networked journalism” have been lowered, and he is trying to help media outlets develop smart tools and ways of making use of crowdsourcing. Read more »
As more sites focus on longform content, Fast Company disclosed some statistics on how its longer pieces have been doing — but the data shows that the real secret isn’t length but ongoing engagement with readers. Read more »
Research from McKinsey seems to suggest that print-based media still commands a large proportion of time spent by consumers of news — but that is just part of the larger picture media companies have to understand. Read more »
We are used to thinking of a “mass media” market made up of large newspapers and TV networks as the normal state of affairs in media, but what if that was just a historical anomaly? Read more »
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 »
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 »
LinkedIn has been making some significant moves towards becoming a media entity focused on business news, and the launch of new magazine-style channels of content is just the latest example of this. Read more »
Startup founder Chad Whitacre caused a fuss recently when he suggested that a reporter do an “open interview” that would be available to everyone — but why is that approach seen as such a threat by some media outlets? Read more »
When the NPR show Planet Money wanted to put together a project about the economic life-cycle of a T-shirt, Kickstarter seemed like the natural approach — and it showed how much crowdfunding has in common with public media. Read more »
The new weekend editor at Gawker’s auto-focused Jalopnik blog got hired because he was a knowledgeable commenter on the site, an example of how the feedback loop between writers and readers can pay off for blogs. Read more »
There is a conventional wisdom in the media industry that micropayments for online content don’t work, but Greg Golebiewski of Znak It says that this isn’t true, and that media companies need to experiment with the model. 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 »
A trade group says that newspapers like the New York Times have seen large increases in circulation, but that’s partly because they are allowed to count their readers multiple times. The industry needs to do better. Read more »
One thing that emerged from our media conference was that there is no single solution when it comes to the future of content, or the monetization of media — and that is probably a good thing. Read more »
While much of the attention during and after the Boston bombings focused on how one Reddit thread got things wrong, there were other important parts of the community that were doing good — and even doing something approaching journalism. Read more »
Twitter’s love affair with television seems to know no bounds — two recent deals with BBC America and Comedy Central will bring video clips inside users’ streams, and more such deals appear to be in the works. Read more »
Want to know what happened last week at paidContent Live 2013? Here are links to transcripts of the sessions from New York. Read more »
Although many other U.S. newspapers have shrunk, the Philadelphia Inquirer has suffered more than most. Will Steacy, whose father was laid off from the paper in 2011, has put together a photo essay showing its decline. Read more »
While both Twitter and Reddit have come under fire for distributing incorrect information about the Boston bombings, mainstream outlets have done so as well. In a real-time news environment, having more sources is ultimately better. Read more »
At our paidContent Live conference in New York, we heard about the disruption in publishing, journalism and advertising from speakers such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed and blogger Andrew Sullivan. Read more »
Newspapers and other media entities have gotten used to thinking of themselves as the most important part of the equation — but why not focus on helping individual brands engage with their audiences and then share in the revenue? Read more »
The U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than $40 billion in ad revenue in the past decade — over half of that in the last four years alone — and Google’s ad revenues are now more than twice what the industry pulls in. Read more »
Paywalls can bring in extra revenue for newspapers and other traditional media outlets, and they can help keep existing readers from leaving — but how do they help bring in new readers? And what happens if they don’t? Read more »
Although its Storyboard editorial operation won awards for the content it curated from the Tumblr network, founder and CEO David Karp said Tuesday the unit is being shut down and all the editorial staff are being let go. Read more »
