Tag Archives: Media News

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

Clay Shirky on the Collapse of Complex Business Models – Media & Newspapers

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…Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

-CShirky read the entire post on Shirky’s blog.

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.

###

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

NPR News Special Coverage Of Life, Career Of Senator Edward M. Kennedy

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MEDIA ADVISORY:

NPR NEWS SPECIAL COVERAGE OF LIFE, CAREER
OF SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY

NPR OFFERING TWO HOUR-LONG SPECIALS TODAY AT 2PM AND 7PM,
CONTINUING COVERAGE THROUGHOUT THE DAY ON-AIR AND AT NPR.org

August 26, 2009; Washington, D.C. – NPR News will offer two special programs today looking at the life and career of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who died last night of complications related to a cancerous brain tumor. Both specials will be broadcast on NPR Member stations nationwide, and will be streamed live at NPR.org. For local stations and broadcast times, visit NPR.org/stations.

From 2:00PM to 3:00PM (ET), NPR congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook will host an hour-long call-in special. Seabrook will interview guests about Kennedy’s life of service and influential career in the Senate, and invite questions from the audience. Guests include Congressman Barney Frank, former U.S. Senator John Sununu, professor and scholar Ronald Walters and Thomas Oliphant, who covered Kennedy for 40 years for the Boston Globe. Listeners may join the conversation by calling (800) 989-8255 or sending an email to talk@npr.org

Beginning at 7:00PM (ET), NPR will explore Kennedy’s life – his role as a legislative lion in the Senate; his focus on civil rights, and on fighting for the disenfranchised; and his personal life and struggles – in an hour-long program. Host Linda Wertheimer will be joined by a roundtable offering political analysis on the legacy Kennedy leaves behind, with legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, senior news analyst Juan Williams, health policy correspondent Julie Rovner and political editor Ken Rudin.

In addition to these specials, NPR will continue to cover the breaking news of Kennedy’s death throughout the day on all of its news programs, and online at NPR.org, where there is a complete obituary, a timeline of Kennedy’s life and archival interviews with the late senator.

-NPR-

“Content is King” – Not so Says Dr. Joe Webb

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How many times have you heard the phrase “content is king”? Perhaps hundreds or thousands of times in the last 10 to 15 years. This has been uttered all those times as a justification for the dominance of publishers of all types—audio, video, text, and images—in the digital age. If it were true, the content kings would not always be whining about profits, downsizing, or restructuring. They’d be riding a wave of successes that emanate from their kingly dominance.

Read the entire article here

NPR NEWS CAPTURES 18 PRESTIGIOUS VISUAL JOURNALISM AWARDS

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npr

WHITE HOUSE NEWS PHOTOGRAPHERS ASSOCIATION BESTOWS “THE EYES OF HISTORY” AWARDS ON NPR JOURNALISTS

February 25, 2009; Washington, D.C. – NPR News has earned 18 honors in the 2009 White House News Photographers Association’s The Eyes of History awards.  The annual awards, announced earlier this week, recognize outstanding achievements in photojournalism.

NPR journalists were recognized in 12 separate categories, more than any other broadcast news media, with three first place awards in the following categories: New Media’s “Best Use of Photography and Audio with Narration,” Still Photography’s “Best Picture in Story/Politics,” and Video Editing’s “Sports.”

The awards will be presented at a White House News Photographers Association gala in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 2009, where the award-winning photographs and videos will be displayed.

The Eyes of History awards honoring the best in photojournalism were established as an annual contest in 1941 by the White House News Photographers Association, founded 20 years earlier.  The awards provide a historical look back on the year, with photos portraying compelling, interesting and memorable coverage of events in Washington and around the world.

Awards won by NPR are outlined below.  To view NPR’s winning entries visit: http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2009/02/whnpa_contest_winners.html Continue reading →

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!

Washington Post to Carpet Bomb DC with Newspapers for Obama Inauguration

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Washington Post’s Inauguration Challenge: Deliver 1.72 Million Newspapers to Record Crowd -from Poynter Online

“The Post plans to publish a total of 1.72 million copies of morning and afternoon editions on Jan. 20 and 21, all for street sales, according to Mike Towle, director of retail and corporate sales.”

Wow.  That’s 1.72 million single copy sales on top of their regular issue for a total of 2.7 million newspapers over the course of 2 days.  Who’s going to clean up that mess?

The newspapers are going for $2 a pop… it just seemed like a nice round number.  I’m predicting early success (photos of the masses holding up “Obama sworn in” newspapers) followed by massive failure (photos of littered newspapers everywhere) inadverdently reinforcing the notion that newspapers are bad for the environment (regardless of how true this is).

Flip the script – or,
The photos appearing everywhere on the internet from inauguration are the masses holding up their Blackberries in a show of solidarity.  we’ll see…

Congratulations to the 2009 duPont-Columbia Awards Winners!

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Congratulations to the 2009 duPont-Columbia Awards Winners!

New York, NY, January 12, 2009—Thirteen winners of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards have been announced by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

WFAA-TV, Dallas, Byron Harris & Brett Shipp
Money for Nothing, A Passing Offense, The Buried and the Dead

ABC News, Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger
Nightline, The Other War: Afghanistan

All Things Considered, NPR, Melissa Block & Robert Siegel
Coverage of the Chengdu Earthquake

California Newsreel, San Francisco, & Vital Pictures, Boston
Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? on PBS

Chicago Public Radio, PRI, NPR, Alex Blumberg & Adam Davidson
This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money

CNN & Christiane Amanpour
God’s Warriors

Current TV & Christof Putzel
From Russia with Hate

HBO, Thomas Lennon & Ruby Yang
Cinemax Reel Life: The Blood of Yingzhou District

NPR & Laura Sullivan
All Things Considered: Sexual Abuse of Native American Women

Oregon Public Broadcasting
The Silent Invasion

Safari Media, ITVS, Chris Sheridan & Patty Kim
Independent Lens, Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story on PBS

WJLA-TV, Washington, DC, & Roberta Baskin
Drilling for Dollars: Children’s Dentistry Investigation

WTVT-TV, Tampa, & Doug Smith
Small Town Justice

Quality journalism and investigative reporting without newspapers? Yes, it can happen. More info about the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia awards

Tribune Not the Death of Newspapers!?

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Despite the Tribune Company’s announcement Monday that it is voluntarily filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the rest of newspaper industry shouldn’t worry just yet.  MU journalism professor Jacqui Banaszynski said,

“I think it’s not just a problem with the industry,” she said. “I think it’s a problem with our society.”

Sam Zell blames the economy… Really?  REALLY?

1.    Acknowledge that your “value” prior to the ubiquity of the Internet was your stranglehold on content delivery.  You filled the needs of businesses and individuals seeking a platform to advertise their products and services to an audience within a geographic area.
2.    To reiterate, your journalism was a nice plus, but the unmet need that your newspaper filled were things like the classifieds section, home sales, movie times, stock quotes, television listings, sports scores, betting lines, puzzles, and comics.
3.    Did you just poopie in your pants a little bit?  You should have because everything I listed is now being better served on the internet.
4.    For god’s sake lets move forward as an industry by saying, the fundamentals of this business have changed.  How can we make money in the new paradigm.  That’s right I said money.

Milton Friedman says that a business has only one responsibility, “economic performance”.
Peter Drucker says that a business’s first responsibility is, “economic performance”.

Interview with Alan Murray: New WSJ.com marks the beginning of a period of rapid innovation

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Telephone interview with Alan Murray, Deputy managing editor and executive editor, online for The Wall Street Journal. This is transcribed from a telephone interview between Alan and I, so don’t kill me if I flubbed a word. Some answers are paraphrased.

First, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I will disclose to you and my readers that I am a print and online subscriber to The Wall Street Journal and some years ago I worked there as a press operator in South Brunswick New Jersey.

META: Alan, after my review of the new website for WSJ.com I was left wanting a little more information regarding the specifics of the new website. Metaprinter’s readers also are interested in some site specifics so I hope this phone interview answers those questions.

META: How long has it been since the site was redesigned?

ALAN: The site was built in 1996 with the intention of being a news service for our paid print-newspaper subscribers. The site underwent a slight redesign in 2002 but until yesterday remained relatively unchanged throughout that time.

META: What prompted you to launch a new site?

ALAN: As I just mentioned, the site was not meant to do what it was trying to do as of late. The new site was designed and implemented to be a news website for subscribers, the general public, (and, Metaprinter assumes, advertisers). In the last one and a half years alone our website traffic has more than doubled. We wanted to better serve that audience.

META: Who did the site design and development? Was it in-house?

ALAN: Early on our in house team worked with Avenue A/ Razorfish for design and other things. Later we worked with Sapient to build and launch the site. Our in house team was involved throughout the entire process.

META: What was the biggest technical departure from the old site?

I didn’t ask this question but id say it’s the emphasis on community and interaction with their readers. The old site didn’t have many opportunities for dialogue.

META: WSJ is in a unique position where many of its paid subscribers come from Wall Street financial institutions. As those institutions collapse and cut back, do you see it impacting your paid subscriber revenue model?

ALAN: Large financial institutions represent a very small portion of our million plus subscribers. Most of our subscribers are small to medium size business owners, CEO’s, CFO’s and individuals interested in business finance.

META: As the only large newspaper with a paid online subscriber model, do you have any plans to go to an advertising based model?

ALAN: many of our offerings are already free to the public and advertiser supported. Sections like politics, and features like our videos and blogs. In the next few months we plan to open up our new community feature to non-subscribers however they will be required to login with their real names.

META: Linked in has a similar model no?

ALAN: Having a community with people interacting is nothing new. We want to test the notion that our unique subscriber base will build a community for intelligent, high-profile discourse.

META: Thank you, any final comments?

ALAN: Our new site is not the end of the line. It is a launch pad for new applications and innovation. It marks the beginning of a period of rapid innovation for WSJ.com. Stay tuned for lots of new developments and thanks for taking notice.

META: Thank you Alan.

End of Interview….

Well readers, Mr. Alan had to catch a plane, but that quick phone interview certainly shed some light on the thinking and planning that goes on when launching a site. Again, this is not a redesign. This is new programming, new applications, a new way of approaching the interaction of between man and machine and the evolving technology behind it.

Change is good
Change is bad
What is the only thing that stays the same?
Change is

Online is the future but does not account for enough of the revenue stream yet to be self sustaining.  What did I learn from this interview?  Hire kick ass developers, journalists, and editors to differentiate your news site from everyone else.  Offer a real value addition to people’s lives.  Even better?  Do one thing and do it so well that it becomes your brand.  News agencies that don’t do this will be swallowed up by other successful site and papers, speeding up the print to online transition.

WSJ Saving Money By Not Giving Me A Paper?

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The weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal has been removed from my student subscription.  For Shame.  Now what will I read my son?  Just because we can put a newspaper on a computer and cell phone does not mean we want to consume it that way all the time.

metaprinter reading the wall street journal to his son

From: The Wall Street Journal
Date: 2008/7/29
Subject: Important Information about your Subscription
To: [address deleted]

As a student subscriber, you have been receiving The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition as part of your subscription. Students across the country have told us that the Monday – Friday editions of The Journal work best with their academic schedules and needs. Based on this feedback, we have adjusted your subscription to deliver only Monday through Friday, effective Saturday, August 2.

You can continue to access all of the articles and features found in the Weekend Edition through the Online Journal at WSJ.com – included in your student subscription to The Journal.

If you would like to continue to receive print copies of the Weekend Edition, please click on this link and complete the online form.

Thank you for being a valued subscriber of The Journal.

 

UPDATE 9-1-2008

One phone call is all it took to request Saturday delivery.  I’m back in the game.

Environmentally Friendly Newspaper Bags And Other Innovations

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Innovation!Eco-Cycle recyclable plastic newspaper bags. I don’t know why this is big news now.  I’m pretty sure the bags that the Wall Street Journal uses have had the recycle symbol on them for a year now.  Now all we need to do is get people to recycle!un recycled newspaper bags

ProImage OnColor ECO This software works to save on CMY ink costs by applying UCR or Under Color Removal to 4 color images.  The end product is a process image that uses a smaller percentage of expensive CMY inks.  Here is yet another innovation which cuts costs, reduces waste, and improves image quality, that I swear I’ve seen before.

Apture: This hyperlink technology uses a mouse over to reveal websites, pictures, video, etc… without clicking through.   This might get annoying, however there is a delay built in so it not as bad as it sounds. Go to the Washington Post’s Celebritology website to see it in action.