Despite all the gloom in the newspaper business, which he says will likely still have to suffer more pain and possible bankruptcies, New York Times media writer David Carr says he believes that thanks to the internet we are living in a “golden age for journalism.” Read more at GigaOM »
The new “public editor” for the New York Times has been getting good reviews for the way she is handling the job of being a go-between for readers and editors. But wouldn’t it be better if every NYT writer and editor did that for themselves? Read more at GigaOM »
The Journal Register newspaper chain has filed for bankruptcy for a second time, which some say means its “digital first” vision is flawed. But all it really means is that the kind of transformation required for the newspaper business will be measured in decades. Read more at GigaOM »
Reddit has grown to become one of the most high-profile online communities, one that has even played a journalistic role in some recent cases. Among the things that newspapers and other media entities could learn from Reddit are the benefits of a strong and engaged community. Read more at GigaOM »
As Twitter continues to expand its control over the content that runs through its network, even as it forms partnerships with large TV networks like NBC, media entities of all kinds are going to have to ask whether their reliance on the service is wise. Read more at GigaOM »
Although the ad-driven business model behind Facebook looks similar to that of a newspaper, the crucial difference is that the social network knows a lot more about its users. The more focus that newspapers put on doing the same, the better off they will be. Read more at GigaOM »
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 at GigaOM »
As more newspapers roll out metered paywalls and subscription plans, trying to duplicate the success of the New York Times, some journalists hope that being funded by readers will help stop the ad-driven pageview race and save quality journalism. But this argument is fundamentally flawed. Read more at GigaOM »
As more and more breaking news comes to us through social media, the task of determining what is true and what isn’t becomes exponentially harder. Storyful says that crowdsourcing is the best way to do this, and so it has opened up its professional verification process. Read more at GigaOM »
Critics of a Newsweek cover story by historian Niall Ferguson say the piece should never have been published because of the errors and flawed logic it contains. But isn’t it better if those kinds of mistakes are corrected in public view instead of behind closed doors? Read more at GigaOM »
As newspapers try and re-engineer their businesses to adapt to the disruption caused by the web and social media, they will have to confront a crucial question: How can they measure the effectiveness of the journalism they are producing — or is pleasing advertisers enough? Read more at GigaOM »
A memo written by the managing editor of the Washington Post in 1992 says a lot about how much of the future of media was obvious even then, but it also misses the most disruptive force the industry has seen — namely, the rise of social media. Read more at GigaOM »
The New York Times has chosen former BBC director Mark Thompson to be its new CEO. But is a man who has spent his entire career with a government-funded broadcaster the right person to reinvent the legendary newspaper at a time of almost unprecedented upheaval? Read more at GigaOM »
The Financial Times and New York Times are at or close to the point where subscription revenue exceeds advertising revenue. This means their paywalls are working, but it also means advertisers are fleeing — and the implications of that for journalism could be significant. Read more at GigaOM »
The Huffington Post has dropped the price of its iPad magazine to zero, and News Corp.’s The Daily has chopped almost a third of its staff — more evidence that the dream many publishers had about the iPad being their savior is still far from reality. Read more at GigaOM »
Research from the Newspaper Association of America shows that most newspapers with paywalls are using a metered model, and free digital access for print subscribers is not a given. Read more »
In response to a GigaOM post about how attacks on WikiLeaks threaten the rights of all media entities, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said he agrees the organization should be protected by the First Amendment and media companies should come to its defence. Read more at GigaOM »
While many still associate BuzzFeed with photo galleries of kittens and other web ephemera, the network has grown into a substantial digital-media entity, and an internal memo from founder Jonah Peretti has some lessons that other media outlets would be wise to pay attention to. Read more at GigaOM »
Remember when Friendster was the hot social network, publishers doubted that ebooks would ever sell, and Netflix thought DVDs in red envelopes was the future? We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Read more »
There are signs that the U.S. government wants to target mainstream journalists and media outlets for the same kind of investigation that WikiLeaks has been subjected to for publishing classified information, which makes it even more important to defend WikiLeaks’ status as a media entity. Read more at GigaOM »
A journalist from Michigan has raised funding through Kickstarter for a project that will see him travel across the U.S. interviewing people about the election. Could that be an alternative model for financing investigative or in-depth reporting by journalists as newspapers continue to cut back? Read more at GigaOM »
As newspapers continue to lay off staff, one question is what will help to fill the gap that is left — where will that journalism come from? We’ve seen signs this week of one partial answer: amateur journalists making use of social media. Read more at GigaOM »
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 at GigaOM »
A simple news service like Evening Edition — which a group of web designers came up with as a side project — contains a number of lessons that mainstream media outlets might want to consider, such as serving readers’ information needs instead of their own. Read more at GigaOM »
Journatic, a local-journalism aggregation startup that used to provide content to newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, has been criticized for a series of ethical lapses. But that doesn’t mean the kind of outsourcing it represents isn’t part of the future of journalism. Read more at GigaOM »
The Washington Post is one of the few major newspapers left without some kind of digital paywall or subscription model, but despite the financial pressures on the company, publisher Donald Graham says he remains committed to not charging readers for the newspaper’s content online. Read more at GigaOM »
There has been a lot of criticism of Advance Publications for shutting down printing of newspapers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but Digital First Media CEO John Paton says the chain should be defended for trying whatever it takes to save its business from certain disaster. Read more at GigaOM »
Publishers may see Next Issue Media’s virtual newsstand as a solution to their digital problems, but it doesn’t fit the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism, and recreating it in digital form isn’t going to help. Read more at GigaOM »
The controversy over new-media startup Journatic and its hyper-local news service says a lot about how difficult it is to find new ways of producing journalism, in part because the traditional media industry and its supporters want to force everything into old models and familiar formats. Read more at GigaOM »
Media startup Journatic has come under fire for using fake bylines for hyper-local content that appeared in the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. But the reality is that something like Journatic is likely a part of the future of local journalism, whether we like it or not. Read more at GigaOM »
Beneath the furor over Twitter’s clampdown on its API is the same dilemma that many traditional media companies like the New York Times are also confronting — namely, how much should you be an open platform, and how much should you be a destination? Read more at GigaOM »
A major error in CNN’s reporting of a landmark Supreme Court decision on Thursday has provided even more ammunition for the ongoing debate over whether it is better to be right rather than first, and whether the scoop as we know it is dead. Read more at GigaOM »
News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has confirmed that the company is considering splitting itself in two, with the newspaper assets spun off as a separate entity. What would — or could — the digital future look like for that standalone newspaper unit? Here are a few ideas. Read more at GigaOM »
News-aggregation services Flipboard and Pulse have both signed deals this week to distribute content from a mainstream outlet — one the New York Times and the other the Wall Street Journal — but they are taking very different approaches when it comes to monetizing those relationships. Read more at GigaOM »
A partnership between the New York Times and Flipboard isn’t just noteworthy because it is a first for the newspaper. It could also be a sign that the NYT‘s philosophical approach toward content in the digital age might be changing for the better. Read more at GigaOM »
Newspapers haven’t really had a monopoly on the news or the advertising market for some time, but they continue to behave as though they do. If they are to survive the transition to a digital future, they will have to learn how to compete for both. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s new feature, which shows enhanced content for certain media partners such as the New York Times, is another example of how the service can be both a partner and a competitor for media companies in the ongoing battle for users’ attention. Read more at GigaOM »
That newspaper owners like Advance Publications need to make a transition from print to digital is not in doubt, but so far all we have seen from the company is massive layoffs and anemic websites. Is this what the future looks like? Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s hiring of editorial staff to curate real-time information around news events through “hashtag pages” may not be a direct competitor for media companies, but the areas of overlap are growing — and so is its attractiveness to the advertisers that media entities desperately need. Read more at GigaOM »
While some mainstream newspaper companies are being dragged toward a digital future whether they like it or not, the Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon has decided to remake itself for a digital and mobile world before it is forced to do so. Read more at GigaOM »
