Category Archives: Innovation

Ask a non-expert: Kindle Fire review

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Ordered a Kindle Fire out of shear curiosity and it arrived yesterday. Here’s my take so far.
PROS:
1. It’s smaller than an iPad making it a pleasure to hold with one hand while navigating with the other.

2. The screen size is just big enough to watch movies on without your eyeballs melting.

3. $199 for a new toy isn’t bad.

4. $75 annual amazon prime membership gives me access to 10k videos (movies, tv shows) and a book library where i can borrow a book a month. (I took out The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins)

5. The controls are mostly intuitive; tap, double tap, spread, swipe, etc…

6. It has adobe air and adobe flash player

7. You can toggle the browser display between Desktop mode and Mobile mode and the websites you visit will reflect that setting.

CONS:
1. You need a WiFi connection at all times to do anything worth doing (aside from reading a book you downloaded)

2. The memory is a measly 6.54 gig so don’t think you can just download everything and sidestep the WiFi need.

3. You need an $75 annual amazon prime membership to access the videos and books.

4. No camera

5. One browser issue, see screenshot below.

6. Navigation not as intuitive as an iPhone or iPad. My 3yo uses those with ease, but the kindle he fumbled around with. Me, i couldn’t find the sound setting (it’s buried under the settings gear icon in the upper right hand corner of the window)

7. I really don’t want to buy two of everything apple apps and amazon apps! blegh…

Overall, I’m still enjoying the device. I’m reading a book and got to watch Girl with the dragon tattoo so i’m happy with that. BUT you need a WiFi connection and an amazon prime account to make this worth your while. Amazon should have sold this for $274 bundled with amazon prime.


BlackBerry for scale.

Houston we have a problem.

New York Times Ends Publication of ‘The Local’ in New Jersey and Directs its Readers to Baristanet

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From the NY Times:

The decision has been made to use the knowledge we have gained from the New Jersey Local and take the experiment in a new and exciting direction. And so today this part of The New York Times hyperlocal experiment has come to an end.

The Times is passing the baton to another site, Baristanet.com. Baristanet is one of the most successful hyperlocal Web sites in the country, and its owners, Debbie Galant and Liz George, both experienced writers and editors, are leaders in the field.

The new and exciting direction of which NYT speaks of is to cease publication… it seems lots of companies these days are trying this new approach to er…business.  Publicly traded NYT shut their experiment down because they couldn’t figure out how to make money with it, plain and simple.  Just looking at the The Local I could say, “where the hell is all the local advertising”?

Thankfully, Galant and George don’t seem to have any problem making money with their local news style.  Their sites content AND advertisements are plentiful and on topic.   A statement from their site follows below. Good luck to them and Happy Newsing.

Press Release from Baristanet

Starting tomorrow, July 1, the place we all call Baristaville gets bigger.

We will begin covering Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange with sites for each town as The New York Times today ends publication of The Local in New Jersey and directs its readers in those three towns to Baristanet.

We’ve served Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield — towns encompassing about 90,000 people — since 2004. Expanding to Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn will bring Baristanet’s coverage area to 150,000.

“Hyperlocal journalism is constantly evolving, and as The Times continues to investigate this arena, we’ll watch with great interest how our friends at Baristanet advance the cause in Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn,” said Jim Schachter, associate managing editor.

We’re thrilled that the Times has passed their hyperlocal baton to us and we will run with it. First and foremost, we are your local homegrown online community. And to that end, we are bringing these new towns into an expanded “Baristaville” by staying local. Journalist and Maplewood resident Jolie Solomon joins the Baristanet team along with community contributors from Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn.

What does this mean for you dear readers? More to love, we hope, and some new voices as we welcome these towns and new readers into the online community you helped create. Thanks for everything you do to make this site an online news and entertainment destination and a true community. And feel free to say hi and interact with your new neighbors in Baristaville.

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Visit Baristanet.com for more.

Visualizing the World Cup – explorations in html 5, css3, jQery and more

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world cup visualization html 5 css3

click image above to experience the World Cup Visualization…

Some of you have asked for more info about the World Cup Visualization I recreated. Honestly, go read the overview of how robby macdonell did it, that’s what I did.

All my data came from wikipedia.  I’m still adding data to this little by little as time permits.

As an aside, I’m pretty comfortable using flash and actionscript and I feel that I could have done this in flash in half the time and with the emergence of things like Smokescreen and other things not yet created I would not discount the ubiquity of Flash for the near future.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG LAUNCHES NYC MEDIA LAB – Innitiative to Promote Media Innovation

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PR- 268-10
June 14, 2010

Partnership of the City, Polytechnic Institute of NYU and Columbia University Will Connect Media Companies with Academic Institutions and Drive Independent Technology Research

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today launched NYC Media Lab, a new initiative to promote innovation within New York City’s media industry. The new laboratory – a consortium of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) and Columbia University – will drive new technology research and connect companies looking to advance new media technologies with local academic institutions undertaking related research. NYC Media Lab builds on models established at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and is the nation’s first government-supported laboratory for media innovation. It will be housed within the NYU Polytechnic Institute campus in Downtown Brooklyn. Mayor Bloomberg made the announcement at the Wired “Disruptive by Design” conference held at the Morgan Library and Museum, where he was joined by New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky, NYU-Poly Provost Dianne Rekow, Columbia University Vice President for Intellectual Property & Technology Transfer Orin Herskowitz, and AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, an advisor to the City’s MediaNYC 2020 initiative. Continue reading →

Main Street Connect sees value in community news

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Metaprinter reader Scott R. shared the link below with us.

…thought you might interested this article from BNET about a new community news/hyperlocal company called Main Street Connect.  The founder of the company, Carll Tucker, talks in the article about how he got inspired to start the company and how it is different from other hyperlocal ventures in the space.

Here is the link to the article- http://blogs.bnet.com/smb/?p=558

Tim Oreilly and Micheal Gough Discuss the Future of Publishing

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O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly joins Michael Gough, Adobe VP for Product Experience, discuss the future of publishing.

O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly joins Michael Gough, Adobe VP for Product Experience, discuss the future of publishing.

O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly joins Michael Gough, Adobe VP for Product Experience, for an in-depth discussion of the rise of electronic content distribution, and its impact on the traditional publishing industry. (30:21 minutes)

Direct from Copenhagen: Don Carli Reporting on Sustainability

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Don Carli, Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Sustainable Communications and EVP, SustainCommWorld, is reporting and blogging live from Copenhagen this week on areas not generally covered by the media.  Below is a major piece for your review on deforestation.

COPENHAGEN ON MY MIND – REDUCING DIGITAL MEDIA TREE-WASH

Most people will tell you that they care about saving our forests, but they tend to be uninformed or misinformed when it comes to knowing the causes of deforestation or some of the places being affected most significantly by land use change that kills trees, pollutes rivers and contributes to climate change. Until recently the conventional wisdom has been to demonize paper and print media as the major culprit behind “killing trees” and to idealize digital media as “green and groovy” alternative without consideration for the full backstory or life cycle footprint of either.

Pixels Don’t Grow on Trees

Paper and print media supply chains are far from being sustainable, but may be far less of a threat to forests than the “Tree-Wash” claims about how digital media saves trees or how pixels are greener than pages. “Tree-Wash” is my term for a special class of “greenwash” making false, misleading or unsupported marketing claims that ignore the causes of deforestation associated with digital media, or that fail to identify the actual trees and forests allegedly being saved or planted.

However, the Copenhagen Climate Summit and technologies developed to verify land use are likely to play a major role in changing the status quo with regard to foot-printing forests, identifying trees and the calculating the climate impacts of coal-powered IT. Continue reading →

Where was Google all this time? – Great story about information dissemination

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William Kamkwamba recounts his mission to overcome famine and poverty in his village by building a windmill from a picture in a library book.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
William Kamkwamba
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Tewspaper: Crowdsourced News Via Twitter and Social Media

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Tewspaper pulls information from user contributions on social media websites and creates a topically sorted newspaper. At launch, the website has five local websites covering Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York City. Each local site also has national news coverage in a variety of subjects such as business, entertainment, and sports.

Baltimore, MD (PRWEB) August 25, 2009 — Tewspaper, an online newspaper without writers, has launched with coverage of five major metropolitan cities – Baltimore, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Tewspaper scours social media websites such as Twitter and filters messages down to breaking news. One of the local sites, Baltimore News, brings algorithmically filtered news to people in Tewspaper’s home town.

Tewspaper is neither endorsed nor sponsored by Twitter or other social media websites; the company uses publicly available APIs to connect with social media sites and find relevant data. One of Tewspaper’s innovations is a system of filtering through the obscure and finding the relevant news on social media sites. For example, Twitter alone has over 2 billion messages, and is growing by thousands of messages per minute. Tewspaper makes it easy to find out what is happening now, in an organized, succinct, and accessible fashion. It is an ideal way for the Internet generation, who text and tweet, to view the news at their rapidly moving pace.

“We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter. From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens,” said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper.

Another obstacle Tewspaper had to overcome was the limited content it could locate for each story. To solve this problem, the website automatically matches images to related stories. Tewspaper determines the optimal image to display for every story based upon the author, subject, headline text, date, links, and other context.

Other local editions are available for Chicago News, Los Angeles News, Dallas News, and New York City News.

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Contact Information
Jared Lamb
Tewspaper
http://www.tewspaper.com
443-857-4829

the Vancouver Project shoots for New Media Coverage of 2010 Olympics

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the Vancouver Project

We want a ‘new media’ approach to the Vancouver Olympics so that people can have a ‘behind the scenes’ view of the Olympics as an experience not just a standard audience view point because people are demanding greater and greater access that we are able to deliver.
—Mission Statement

Read all about their efforts at the Vancouver Project blog.

Game Changer – HP Introduces World’s First Web-connected Home Printer

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(from yesterday)

HP today unveiled the world’s first web-connected home printer: The HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web.

HP is bringing the power of the web directly to the printer and combining it with HP’s TouchSmart technology to give people quick, easy, touchscreen access to popular digital content.

Designed for the digital generation and connected households, the HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web features an entirely new web-based printing platform with HP applications (apps). Similar to other Internet-connected devices, these apps, which are viewable on an extra-large, intuitive-to-use TouchSmart panel, allow people to connect instantly with fun, informative and personal content.

View the entire Release Here

Steve Buttry’s Blueprint For News Media Companies

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A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection is exactly what it sounds like.  Steve Buttry is editor of The Gazette and GazetteOnline a news source for eastern Iowa, Cedar Rapids, and Iowa City. On his blog he graciously shares his detailed 38page blueprint for the path ahead for Gazette Communications.

This is a must read for all news media professionals.  The document is insightful and creates great potential for reflection on business practices. I’m not saying his blueprint is THE best, but even if you hate his ideas, there are lots of salient points to build on. One obvious forehead-smacking point he raises is that the details of his blueprint, “will be determined not by my decree but by the needs of the marketplace and by the creativity and abilities of the staff”.  Did you catch that?  THE NEEDS OF THE MARKETPLACE.  In the internet paradigm, what needs are you now filling?  I love it.

Something I wish Steve would have addressed more clearly is the distinction between geographic communities and communities of interest.  Does he agree there is a distinction?  Why or why not?  Can print and online serve both communities equally well? How does his blueprint address these distinct communities?

I emailed Steve and asked about the above points.  Here is his response:

Robert, absolutely there is a difference between geographic communities and communities of interest. However, the local media organization has its strongest opportunities to appeal to communities with at least a geographic tie. For instance, we attract attention of Iowa Hawkeye fans around the world. They are a community of interest, but they have a geographic tie. The blueprint details plans to help countless communities of interest within and overlapping a geographic community – the family/friends of each high school graduate or engaged couple, congregations, etc. Print can serve some communities of interest (we have a business magazine and a magazine geared for young adults), but because of the cost of transportation, print is quite geographically based. Thanks for asking.

There you have it metaprinter readers, ask and you shall recieve.

RELATED:

How are you going to make money? By changing your relationship with your community -from OJR.org

Sustainable Revenue Idea For Newspaper Publishers

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“What does your audience want from you – and do you know what they will pay for?”.  -from PWC

Many newspapers have not honestly asked themselves this question because if they did they would be the largest creators of business websites in their DMA.  As a consultant I work with local business owners to do things like build / rebuild their websites, add their sites and business to listing sites like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp and others.

Newspapers should be doing this, not me.  It should be a big, growing part of their revenue stream.  I know of only one newspaper doing something close to this and that is Cox Ohio publishing.  Here’s an excerpt from a quick interview with Internet General Manager Ray Marcano from Cox Ohio Publishing explaining more.

End America East Session Follow up with Ray Marcano:

RI- Looking forward, what will your main revenue streams be?
RM-  Direct sales not tied to print / classified upsells.  Our direct sales are up 30% year over year.

RI- Tell me about your Ad Studio business.  When did it launch?  Who is using it?  Is it a major revenue stream?
RM- We started that business in 2008.  Our biggest customers are media companies outsourcing to COX for ad design.  It is a significant new revenue stream.

RI- Is an online only presence like the what the Seattle P-I did anything your company has considered?
RM – No because our product is thriving, that’s not to say we don’t have stand alone online sites because we do have 937moms.com and activedayton.com

RELATED:

Free Advertising Ideas For Newspaper Publishers

Part 2 More Advertising Ideas For Newspaper Publishers where I talk about setting up an advertising fair for for courting local businesses.

Second Street Media Solutions Owners Matt Coen and Doug Villhard Discuss Upickem online contesting platform.

USA Today Launches Another “Community of Interest” News Site Today

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In my interview with Alan Jacobson recently he emphasized the importance of newspapers shifting their online focus to “community of interest” news sites instead of geographic community sites; which are essentially general interest newspapers recreated on a website.  I agree and have been pushing the idea here on metaprinter for quite some time as well.

Because of their inherent targeting, community-of-interest news sites have high reader engagement, more vibrant communities, and are better venues for targeted advertising.  Just look at techcrunch or Kotaku.

USA Today launched  MMA Fighting Stances, a mixed martial arts community site today.  This is the newest in a string of community sites that Gannett is launching (Open Road, Hotel Check-In, Game Hunters, The Oval, and Faith & Reason).  

What do I like? Continue reading →

Mobile Innovation Forum This Tuesday in Boston

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Xconomy’s first-ever Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England will be held Tuesday April 7, 2009.

One can’t-miss highlight of the forum will be a “fireside” chat with Rich Miner, who brought the Android platform to Google and was recently named general manager of the new Google Ventures, and Sandy Pentland, the MIT Media Lab luminary who leads the Next Billion Network for mobile entrepreneurs and has been using mobile digital sensors to study social signaling between people. (Pentland just published a book on that subject, Honest Signals).

This looks like a great event for anyone in the Boston area on Tuesday.  Especially considering Mit’s Next Billion Network states, “Within the next three years, another billion people will begin to make regular use of cell phones, continuing the fastest adoption of a new technology in history”.

Jacek Utko: Can design save the newspaper? TED2009

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Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save the newspaper? Should newspapers be Free? Tabloid? Local? Niche? Opinion? Breakfast fodder? “In the long run there is no practical reason for newspapers to survive” states Jacek. Regardless, he is working with newspapers to create entirely new workflows and embedding great marketing, via design, right into the products.

Why you should listen to him:

Newspaper designer Jacek Utko suggests that it’s time for a fresh, top-to-bottom rethink of the newspaper. (At this point, why not try it?) In his work, he’s proved that good design can help readers reconnect with newspapers. A former architect, Utko took on the job of redesigning several newspapers in former Soviet Bloc nations, starting from basic principles. He worked closely with newspaper executives to figure out the business goals of their papers, and then radically reformatted the product to fit those goals. (And he wasn’t afraid to break a few grids in the process.)

As the art director at Warsaw’s Puls Biznesu in 2004, he redesigned this small business-focused newspaper and immediately won the SND award for world’s best-designed newspaper. Readers responded, and circulation went up. He’s now art director for the Bonnier Business Press, overseeing papers in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and the work he oversees consistently wins major prizes (including another SND world’s-best in 2007 for Estonia’s Äripäev), despite their small teams and limited resources.

“Who knew that the world’s best designed newspapers are in Poland and Estonia?”

-June Cohen, TED

RELATED:
TED2009 Evan Williams: How Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses
TED2005 Sasa Vucinic: Why a free press is the best investment

Post Digital Design? Newspapers Return!

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Really Interesting Group is a multi disciplinary organisation working in post digital design. Partners work independently or collaboratively and share resources across the group.  We collected some things from the internet we thought would work well on paper and we made it into a newspaper with a limited edition run of 1,000.

You can read more about the project and see some great photos via noisydecentgraphics blog.


Really Interesting Group from This Happened – London on Vimeo.

I stumbled upon this through http://www.thishappened.org/ which I normally would just tweet or bookmark on delicious and move on, but it was just too cool to skip.  I love the design of their printed newspaper.  The lines are so crisp and clean, “I wanted to avoid it looking like a newspaper that a designer had been let loose on. Graphics every-fucking-where. Something you might see from a bad brand”.  Objective accomplished!

What about the font Robert?  Well, “The brief was to be able to read it in bed without glasses on. So I wanted the type to be biggish and nice and clear”.  Mission Accomplished! The American newspaper industry could have used these types of designs a while back. I know redesigns won’t save an entire industry, but maybe the few surviving newspapers will take some design cues from this project?!

Big Picture Blog Earth Hour 2009

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More than 1,000 cities in over 80 countries observed Earth Hour 2009 on Saturday March 28th, as homes, office towers and landmarks turned off their lights for an hour starting at 8.30 pm local time to raise awareness about climate change and the threat from rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The before and after are displayed in really cool javascript enabled pictures which fade to darkness (before and after) when clicked. Go try it out! and Kudos again to Alan Taylor for putting this together.

RELATED:

Earth Hour: http://www.earthhour.org

Las Vegas Uplugs for Earth Hour

Flickr Earth Hour 2009 Slideshow

Readability Cleans Up The Clutter

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I’ve been guilty of reading the “print view” version of long interesting articles on news sites to remove all the noise and clutter of those sites. Sometimes I’ll even use the Web Designer’s Toolbar to disable javascript. Some smart people at arc90 labs have gone several steps further and created the above “browser bookmarklet on steroids” to improve the reading experience.

Purists will say I’m not supporting the site by avoiding their advertising, but you know what? In the 14 years I’ve been using the internet, I have never intentionally clicked on an advertisement. If in the last 14 years, the only thing those sites can come up with to grab my attention is a Pop Under ad, then they fail – not me. Continue reading →

Communications 2019 From Microsoft

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Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 (montage + video) -istartedsomething.com February 28th, 2009

When Microsoft decides to imagine the future, it never fails to impress. Not only do you have some of the smartest people envisioning what’s possible, but they also invest so much into communicating these ideas through sights and sounds which the production value can be compared to most blockbuster sci-fi films.

Below is a montage of the full 5minute Microsoft video. At the 30 second mark you see someone reading an electronic newspaper. Check out the full video at the link above. In that video, newspapers appear at 4:20 and go till 5:10, worth the wait to see their vision of the future of news. Microsoft’s vision does not include citizen journalism or beatblogging or whatever else you want to call it. In their vision, technology hands the power back to big companies and the rich people who can afford their products. I didn’t see any screen shots to indicate this electronic newspaper technology was cheap or designed to be consumed by the masses, just some rich white guy in his Jetsons house.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

New York Times Article Skimmer Prototype

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Grid Format User Interfaces All The Rage?

Navigating the home page of most newspaper websites stinks.  There are literally hundreds of links scattered about with very little thought toward user engagement and ease of use.  In the 14 years that most news sites have been in use, it still seems easier to navigate a printed newspaper than a news site.

Personally speaking, I can skim through an entire Wall Street Journal in about 5 minutes before going back and reading entire articles that interest me.  Try doing this on a news site and you will quickly realize that there is no seamless way to recreate the speed and effectiveness.  The New York Times article skimmer and others below attempt to solve this problem.

The New York Times is working on the new user interface prototype for their content called ‘article skimmer’.  Below is a screen shot of their Dining & Wine section in Article Skimmer. It’s a nice clean layout, good for scanning.

Continue reading →

Washington Times Evaluating Personalized Editions of its Newsweekly

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Wash. Times evaluating tailored pub -from newspapers&technology

“We have agreed to create an environment where a certain number of customers can go online and customize their weekly edition of The Washington Times by adding or subtracting content on the fly,” he said. “We are shooting to do that four times and then we will go back to readers and take a poll as to their reactions.”

The results of the poll will be released at the Summer 2009 Individuated News Conference in June.

Related:

Hewlett Packard Inkjet Web Press For Newspapers

Syntops Technology: fully automated workflow

Océ Digital Presses

Adrian Holovaty Puts Out A Call For Revenue Ideas

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Looking toward EveryBlock’s future -from holovaty.com

“…we’ve reached an interesting point in our project’s growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we’re open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That’s a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock’s philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?

We have a number of ideas for sustaining our project beyond a dependency on grants, like building a local advertising engine and/or selling hosted versions of the open-source software, but we’re sure there are other ways for EveryBlock to be a successful business. That brings me to the reason I’m posting this — we’re looking for ideas and partners who would be interested in helping us figure this out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, get in touch with me. I’m confident we’ll make something happen; it’s just a matter of how.”

How do I think EveryBlock can become economically sustainable?

1. Gannett or Advance Publications buys the services of the entire EveryBlock team to incorporate EveryBlock into their news sites.  Most importantly the team is tasked with creating logical, simple, cheap ad placement on news sites.   The Code remains open source.

2. Go the Firefox route and partner with Google to make their search the default search on EveryBlock. Make millions a year, remain open source.

3. Partner with Apple to to have Everyblock preloaded onto every iPhone and iPod.  This frees Apple up from using popular Google apps like Maps and Yahoo apps like Local. This make even more money when partnered with the applestore.

4. Go the WordPress route and offer consulting and other services.

5. If anyone knows how to make money online it is Amazon.com.  Maybe they can use EveryBlock for geo-tagging their products and services.

6. Make Weichert or some other huge realtor the default real estate search for EveryBlock.

7. Offer EveryBlock and EveryBlog (currently taken by drupal)  franchises to locals looking to get into publishing.

Lastly, I just want to mention that in its current iteration, Everyblock is extremely impersonal and that adding or partnering with content producers like blogs or news sites could add real value via increased community participation.

I’m sure there are others.  Share your ideas!

Print CEO Blog revisits Digital Newspapers

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Will the Printed Blog Save the Newspaper Industry? -from PrintCEOblog

Ran across this recently and found it pretty interesting:

http://www.theprintedblog.com

The stated intent is to turn around the newspaper industry:

The Printed Blog is changing the way people read and consume news and other information. We hope to play a vital part in reversing the fortunes of the newspaper industry with this new media project… but we need your help.

I wish them the best of luck. I pitched a similar product to the washington post and tribune however neither was interested.

My idea, found here, uses feedjourn.com’s software to aggregate and paginate content and images.

The real up-sell here is taking the one competitive advantage newspapers have (distribution) and leveraging it to deliver ads and other products better than direct mail and the internet can.

Take a look at this mockup (PDF) and the advertising associated with it.

The revenue potential is great. General interest newspapers that just move their product online are dead.

CNN.com’s K. C. ESTENSON on CNN.com

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Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? - from NYTimes.com

K. C. ESTENSON, the new general manager of CNN.com, has a thought or two about most news sites on the Web: they’re predictable and homogeneous. Seen one, seen ’em all.

Even his own site, he says, could use more of a “unique signature.”

While traffic to the home page of CNN.com is higher than ever, “my hunch is that people go to it more out of habit than they do out of love,” he says.

Alright, so what are you going to do about it Mr. Estenson? He never really says what he’s going to do to increase their rankings.  Also, CNN.com is the highest trafficked American News website already, so how will he measure success?

Newspaper Publisher with an Excellent Attitude and A Solid Plan!

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Scot Morrissey becomes the new Publisher of The Athens Banner-Herald and OnlineAthens.com today. Read his statements here. Somebody forward that article to Paul Mulshine.

Scot Morrissey:

While some newspaper executives complain that free access to news content online is killing paid circulation, turning a profit from an online product is just “logistics of business,” Morrissey said.

“We are no longer mass marketers. We are niche warriors,” he said. “We are putting out magazines for women’s issues only. We are putting out magazines for music. We are putting out products for Georgia football only. Those are unique segments of our market.

Again, go read this article. I really like Scot’s positive attitude but more, I like his ideas for innovation. Many times you hear publishers, like the Detroit Duo, who stay positive on newspapers but then completely blow it by staying the course.

The OnlineAthens.com website has pretty good stats for the area it serves. The Quantcast stats show it has roughly 28k uniques per day, and 176k per month. The one big problem is that every single metric for the site has been falling for the last 3 months. However, if Scot sticks with his plan for diversified revenue streams and niche content, this will not be a problem.

Congratulations Scot! We’ll be tracking your progress here at metaprinter.

UPDATE:
January 18, 2009 Quantcast shows online visits still trending downward.

RELATED LINKS:

Here is another one-man story of enthusiasm 
Starting Your Own Paper Blog… er Newspaper – The Ed Shamy Model

Why Do People Like Rachel Maddow?

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Rachel Maddow always thought she was an outsider. How did she become a star? -from Newsweek.com “Maddow’s partner, artist Susan Mikula, believes the “unlikely” label is just code for lesbian: “She goes from Stanford to Oxford to activism to radio, then TV? What’s so unusual about that? Is it because she is a gay lady?”

She is successful because she is engaging. She is her own brand. When she didn’t host the other night I was like, “where is she? did she get hurt? what’s going on?” I was actually concerned. Most other media personalities get lost in a small crowd.

This is the same reason I read Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman at NYTimes.com.

Who is the Wall Street Journal‘s most famous personality?
Is it Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger? No, he went to ProPublica…

Who is the Washington Post‘s most famous personality?
Is it weekly columnist Charles Krauthammer?

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Recap from Changing Media Landscape event at Columbia Journalism School November 11, 2008.

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Columbia J-school’s annual look at the media revolution, with several media influencers – and no Powerpoint! Columbia-Hearst Journalism Dialogues and the Columbia Journalism Alumni Association present: Changing Media Landscape 2008

Comments in Bullet Points and direct quotes appear in quotes.  Moderated by Sree Sreenivasan -Dean of Student Affairs & Professor Columbia Journalism School.

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“Any Idiot Can Do This” – Michael Rosenblum Society of Editors Conference 2008

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Michael Rosenblum (former CBS News producer) presenting at the Society of Editors conference November 10, 2008. This is excellent. Exactly the type of paradigm shift and reaction we report on at Metaprinter. He argues, quite convincingly, that in the new information and news paradigm ONE person with a camera can outperform an entire news agency.

“The technology today is all automatic and dirt cheap.  The cost is effectively zero.  The problem that you’re (news producers) encountering is that you’ve come up against a new technology and you don’t like it. ”


Michael Rosenblum @ Society of Editors 08 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.

Click to continue for the other 2 videos.

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Metaprinter to Twitter Changing Media Landscape, 2008 NYC

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Changing Media Landscape, 2008
November 11, 2008
Columbia J-school’s annual look at the media revolution, with several media influencers – and no Powerpoint! Columbia-Hearst Journalism Dialogues and the Columbia Journalism Alumni Association present:
• Sewell Chan, blogger/editor, The New York Times “City Room” blog (from midtown)
• Adriano Farano, executive editor, CafeBabel.com (from Paris)
• Erica Smith, news designer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and “Paper Cuts” blog (from St. Louis)
• Jacob Weisberg, chairman, Slate (from midtown)
Tuesday, 6:30-9 pm (reception from 6:30-7 pm)

Follow My Twitter Feed for Updates as they happen and revisit this site for complete coverage of this event.

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Refocusing Newspaper Content

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Before widespread internet usage, newspapers needed to have in-house staff covering every aspect of their content. The ubiquity of the internet has destroyed those old needs and has opened up new opportunities.

THE PATH TODAY
Newspapers are attempting to succeed by operating in the old information paradigm.

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Breaking Newspaper Innovation!! Reddit and UK Newspaper ‘The Independent’ Team Up

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It is getting increasingly harder for me to report on newspaper industry innovation news, there just isn’t much out there.  Today makes up for all the latest goose eggs.   Social news / ranking / aggregator site Reddit has partnered with British Newspaper The Independent to offer Reddit functionality to the newspaper site.  I think this is a big step in the correct direction for newspaper websites.  I have said all along that it is not the original content sinking newspaper sites, but their crummy user experience, navigation, and link structures which are horrible.

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Contrarian Newspaper Business Model – All The Wrong Moves

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ENOUGH!!! Everyone stop doing what everyone else is doing. I present you today with the metaprinter contrarian business model, otherwise entitled ALL THE WRONG MOVES.  As the name implies, the business model takes all the recent attempts to “save the newspaper industry” and flips them on their head.  The model is based heavily on the quote below, but once you read the contrary ideas, they don’t sound so crazy.    

Warren Buffett says

“Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful”

SO…

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Part 2, Good Media Website Examples – News Blogs and News Aggregators

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Part two of the best newspaper websites.  I continue this post listing my selection for the best news blogs and news aggregators.  Without further ado, I give you more good media website examples:

Click to visit site

Click to visit site

POPURLS – From the site: “popurls is the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the internet. Popurls is considered as a gate to a highly selective collection of the most popular sites, presented in a usable way for every device & service.

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Part 1, Good Media Website Examples – Newspapers

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You know from my sidebar that I keep a dynamic list of good news media websites.  Some of the examples are newspaper websites, there are a couple of news aggregators on there, and few stand alone news sites.  They all exhibit something unique and compelling which makes me go back to them over and over again.  Here I break down why I think the following sites are Great Newspaper Website Examples.

Click image to see larger size

Click image to see larger size

The Las Vegas Sun – I would say that this is THE BEST newspaper site in America however, it is not a traditional newspaper. Only a smaller version of the site is printed and distributed, as an insert, in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Still, this site kicks ass. It utilizes multimedia news reporting throughout the site, not just features. You’ll notice in the pictures above that the the front page changes every day, there are no rigid templates. The site uses Django and the Ellington CMS to do this as well as the genius of Rob Curley.

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Metaprinter Offers a New, Innovative, Digital Newspaper Business Model – Infinite Zoning

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My readers, and the subjects of my rants, know that I cannot stand when a rehashed idea is unjustly called an innovation.  When I see such things, especially when an industry “expert” is involved, I call them out on it.  Some people think I’m insensitive but I just tell it like I see it.  It does no good to the newspaper industry to applaud mediocrity, not at this critical point.  So in late August when I criticized newspaper designer Mario Garcia and his redesign business, I did just that.

I also understand that it is too easy to just criticize and offer up platitudes.  I must defend my definition of innovation, no?  Below is something I’ve been working on since 2007 that addresses many issues destroying the newspaper industry. It is a well thought out (if I don’t say so my self), well argued, and viable. It is a digital newspaper business model which could be launched TODAY should an investor or publisher choose to do so.  ENJOY!

The My Post Infinite Zoning model

Market Demand:
A paradigm shift in information streams has fragmented traditional newspaper and magazine business models. Former subscribers are fleeing print media to fill their customization and personalization needs online.

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Gas Shortage in Atlanta Eased by Twitter Feeds. Traditional Media? FAIL!

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In case you don’t know, there is a gasoline shortage in the south and the Atlanta area in particular. The New York Times says, “The problem began when Hurricanes Gustav and Ike battered Gulf Coast refineries, reducing the national refinery capacity by as much as 20 percent. It worsened as nervous drivers stockpiled gasoline”.

Where can you find gas? How can you find gas if you can’t drive around to find it? As Clay Shirky would say, “HERE COMES EVERYBODY”! Twitter to the rescue! By inserting hash tags into tweets, people are able cover one topic completely, or at least better than traditional media. When people started communicating their need for gas in Atlanta an #atlgas hash tag was born. Continue reading →

The Right Way to Use New Technology – LA Times Uses Django to Power Metrolink Crash Database

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A while back I wrote a story about The Rocky Mountain News and their incredibly stupid use of Twitter. I would like to report now on a fantastic usage of newer technology by a newspaper.

The California Metrolink crash on September 12, 2008 was covered by The LA Times website with a Django powered database. The database was up and running in only 3 hours once the decision was made to utilize it. I commend Megan Garvey, morning Metro assignment editor and Ben Welsh, database producer, for the outstanding job they did in reporting this tragedy. Continue reading →

New York Times to Offer Developers API Key For Data Mash-Ups

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The New York Times’ chief technology officer Marc Frons and Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news spoke recently with New York media blog fishbowlNY.  The topic of discussion was their API and the desire to open the code up to, “programmers, developers, and others”.  The timeline is weeks to months. Below are a few excerpts.

The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data.” Continue reading →

After One Month, How is Ledger Live Doing?

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Alexa Graph

NJ.com site metrics as of September 22, 2008

NJ.com site metrics as of September 22, 2008

According to Alexa and Who.is info, we can see that the month following the release of Ledger Live generated losses in reach, rank, and page views. So despite the fact that Fast Company contributor Robert Scoble reports this as “one encouraging early trial“, the data tells us otherwise.

I wish Mr. Scoble had used this article to talk about some real innovation going on in newspapers, not this example.  Video on news sites?  Stop the presses!!!! Newspapers need to give their customers a real reason to stick with their product.

Every time a reader decides she’s going to quit her print subscription and make the move to the world of online news, she’s confronted with a new set of decisions. Instead of the local paper, she has her choice of thousands of papers and content providers. The goal of the newspaper at this critical
point is to get their readers to stick to their paper even when they make the switch to online.

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Newspaper Retail Stores Strengthen Their Brand in Airports

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Media companies have been opening retail stores in airports since 2002 when CNBC opened a store in Kansas City, MO.  But Newspapers have been slow to utilize this marketing opportunity.  The New York Times opened a their first “airport” store in 2005 and currently owns two.  USA Today just opened their first Airport retail store on Wednesday September 17, 2008.  The store, actually 3 stores, will be located in Detroit Metropolitan Airport and are managed by HDS Retail North America.   They plan to open 3 more in another airport by years end.

Why open a retail store in an airport?  Why not?  A quick check of some stats shows Dulles airport having 24.7 million passengers in 2007 and BWI airport having 21.4 million from the last 12 months. 

“We look for unique opportunities to expand the brand and expand our awareness and also reap some additional revenue,” said John Malkin, Fox’s vice president for affiliate marketing. AP News

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