NewsTrust - New Media - Most Recent Stories: News (Mainstream)

Google Computes News Quality

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

InformationWeek - By Thomas Claburn - Nov. 16 (News Report) - A recently filed patent application suggests that Google is taking steps to promote news produced by major media companies on Google News. Whenever a newspaper dies, Google turns up on the list of suspects. The evidence of Google's involvement tends to be sketchy. A close examination of the crime scene typically points to a different villain -- the classified revenue killer known as Craigslist, parasitic news sites that siphon potential visitors, declining subscription and ad revenue, management that can't adapt, or the hyper-competition created by the Internet's ability to collapse distance and divert attention. But Google nonetheless has been forced to defend itself. In May, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet that Google is the hand that feeds media companies, channeling over one billion clicks every month to online publishers through Google Search and Google News. She suggested that Wikipedia, with its constantly updated articles, might offer a better model for journalism in the Internet age than a series of separate articles. And she proposed that online publishers might be failing their readers by presenting them with Web pages that lack engaging social features.

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Hellman to invest $5 million in journalism nonprofit

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By James Temple - Sep. 25 (News Analysis) - San Francisco financier Warren Hellman will invest $5 million to develop a nonprofit journalism venture that will provide regional news coverage online and feed stories to media partners including KQED and possibly the New York Times. The goal of the organization, which is expected to begin next year and create "more than dozens" of positions, is to ensure thorough coverage of local politics, social issues, education and other topics as the traditional media industry shrivels. "We've lost a lot," said Hellman, who specifically bemoaned dwindling reporting on subjects like the San Francisco Ballet, local business openings and vetting of political candidates. "We're going to be meeting an unmet need."

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In San Francisco, Plans to Start News Web Site

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Richard Perez Pena - Sep. 25 (News Report) - A wealthy investor, a university journalism school and a public radio station have joined forces to create a nonprofit local news Web site for the San Francisco area, in what may be the largest and most ambitious of dozens of similar local news operations that have cropped up around the country.

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Google Releases News-Reading Service

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Miguel Helft - Sep. 15 (News Report) - Google is making a bold attempt to be seen as its friend with a new service it hopes will make it easier for readers to view newspaper and magazine articles.

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Microblogging has become too important for Twitter to rule the field.

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Aug. 14 (Special Report) - Twitter is run by a single company in a single office building in San Francisco. When you send out a message, it flies about Twitter's servers and then alights in all your Twitter pals' cell phones and Tweetdecks. The system is fast and technologically simple, which helps explain its exponential growth.

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Meet Afghanistan's Biggest Blogger

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Annie Lowrey - Aug. 13 (Special Report) - At this point, the litany of contemporary Afghanistan's problems is well known. The country has few paved roads, let alone computers; its population is poor and illiterate; it is blighted with poverty, disease, and violence. For the past 30 years, Kabul has been under the control of radicals, strongmen, foreigners, or some combination of the three. Only rarely can the foreign reporters who describe these conditions leave the safe bubble of Kabul or the back seat of an armored vehicle. As a result, Afghanistan's people, culture, and traditions remain woefully unknown to the world, or reduced to crude stereotypes.

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Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Aug. 05 (News Report) - Media Cloud is a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form.

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Digital Nomads Choose Their Tribes

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael S. Rosenwald - Jul. 26 (News Report) - Teleworkers Find Camaraderie in a New Kind of Colleague Nomad life is already evolving. Nomads who want the feel of working with officemates have begun co-working in public places or at the homes of strangers. They work laptop-by-laptop in living rooms and coffee shops, exchanging both idle chitchat and business advice with people who all work for different companies. The gatherings are called jellies, after a bowl of jelly beans the creators were eating when they came up with the name. Although the number of digital nomads is intrinsically difficult to measure -- they are constantly in motion and difficult to pin down for polling -- evidence of a real shift in where Americans work is mounting. Dell reports that its digital nomad Web site is getting tens of thousands of hits a month. Panera, a popular spot for people working wirelessly, logs 1.5 million WiFi sessions a month.

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Exiting the Sarahsphere

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By Daniel Libit - Jul. 24 (News Analysis) - With Sarah Palin’s tenure as governor of Alaska coming to a self-determined close, there’s one group facing some major change: the bloggers. Palin — the object of their attention for the past 11 months, the person who gave them unfathomable readerships and platforms — is departing the local Alaska scene. And the occasion will be marked by many.

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UAE Blackberry update was spyware

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - By Ben Thompson - Jul. 21 (News Report) - A software update promoted by United Arab Emirates telecoms firm Etisalat appears to have been surveillance software.

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Financial Times editor says most news websites will charge within a year

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By John Plunkett - Jul. 17 (News Report) - The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription

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Michael Wolff on Politico

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Vanity Fair - By Michael Wolff - Jul. 04 (Special Report) - Four old-media veterans may have solved the future of news with the Politico Web site, whose audience of six million obsessives and insiders consumes–and feeds–a real-time download of power data. The twist? Politico’s print version is what’s helped make it profitable.

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Poetry From Iran, One Tweet at a Time

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Public Radio - By Davar Iran Ardalan - Jun. 28 (Special Report) - Persians are known for their poetry. So it is not surprising that as recent dramatic events have unfolded in Iran, so many Iranians who have been alerting the world have written poetically — even in their tweets. Meet 26-year-old Parham Baghestani. I reached Baghestani in the fabled Iranian city of Isfahan, where he lives. Isfahan is known for its exquisite turquoise domes and rich history in poetry and philosophy.

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CEOs Are Social Media Slackers

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Belinda Goldsmith - Jun. 25 (News Report) - The heads of the top U.S. companies might be engaged in the boardroom, but they’re switched off when it comes to social media, according to a new study that said CEOs should be more connected to their customers.

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The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kevin Kelly - Jun. 17 (News Analysis) - The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism. Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

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Iran protests: In Iran, rival factions rally after days of unrest

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Jeffrey Fleishman - Jun. 16 (News Report) - Iran has slipped into a guerrilla-style Internet and Twitter game of strategies and slogans pecked out by protesters attempting to outflank a government that has shut down communication outlets, leaving the nation breathless on snippets of text and stealthily uploaded pictures.

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Who's Winning Iran's Google War?

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Scott E. Hartley - Jun. 15 (News Analysis) - Google Trends, stocked with data from 64 million Internet users in the Middle East -- half of whom live in Iran -- might be able to help us learn what potential Iranian voters are thinking right now. Looking at the Web tells us much about the candidates' domestic strongholds and their international support. Online behavior, from Twitter to search engines, offers clues about where supporters are congregated. Internet penetration in Iran has increased more than 9,000 percent since 2000. Today, more than one third of all Iranian citizens are online. And those online citizens are interested in politics; Over the past 90 days, Farsi-language Google searches for "Ahmadinejad" have increased by 350 percent, "election" by 950 percent, "Mousavi" by 1,300 percent, and "debate" (as in the televised ones between candidates) by what Google Insights for Search -- a site that allows you to compare global search volumes -- calls "breakout" proportions.

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The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Sam Anderson - May. 25 (Special Report) - Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. We hunt it in neurology labs, lament its decline on op-ed pages, fetishize it in grassroots quality-of-life movements, diagnose its absence in more and more of our children every year, cultivate it in yoga class twice a week, harness it as the engine of self-help empires, and pump it up to superhuman levels with drugs originally intended to treat Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course—it’s basically impossible for humans not to—but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically.

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The rebirth of news

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - May. 18 (News Analysis) - The race is crowded, but San Francisco stands a fair chance of becoming the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The San Francisco Chronicle, founded in 1865, is trimming its already pared-down staff in an attempt to avoid closure. And if it does disappear? “People under 30 won’t even notice,” says Gavin Newsom, the city’s mayor. Most industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business. Things are worst in America, where many papers used to enjoy comfortable local monopolies, but in Britain around 70 local papers have shut down since the beginning of 2008. Among the survivors, advertising is dwindling, editorial is thinning and journalists are being laid off. The crisis is most advanced in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it is happening all over the rich world: the impact of the internet, exacerbated by the advertising slump, is killing the daily newspaper.

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‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Claire Cain Miller, Brad Stone - Apr. 14 (Special Report) - If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.

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Teens Love Aggregation and 'Free', Newspaper Study Finds

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By John C Abell - Apr. 10 (Special Report) - Teenagers aren't likely to pay for news and love aggregation sites, according to a new study. This is especially bad news for online newspapers since two of the big industry ideas right now are a) charge for content, and b) put the aggregators out of business. On the heels of Google CEO Eric Schmidt telling the Newspaper Association of America at its San Diego Convention Tuesday that newspapers were on the verge of alienating their online customers comes a study from the same trade group which also provides no cause for optimism. Teens, who came of age in the internet era and were weaned on freemium economics, view news as a commodity they don't have to pay for, the study [.pdf] finds. "Not only are teens not rushing to pay for content, but they also struggle to envision in what realm they would need to pay for content," said the study, conducted for the NAA by Northwestern University's Media Management Center. They are less interested in news brands than a site's usability and depth of content. "Ask teens where they find news, and they typically say Yahoo!, Google, AOL or MSN," the study said. "Sometimes, they mean Yahoo! and other times they mean Yahoo! News; sometimes they mean Google, the search bar, and other times they mean Google News or iGoogle. And sometimes they say MSN but mean MSNBC.com." "Whichever option they choose, it’s clear that they believe such aggregators, portals and search engines serve them well," the study concluded. "They like their brevity and compact approach."

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Schmidt to Newspaper Execs: I'm From Google, and I'm Here to Help

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By John C Abell - Apr. 10 (News Report) - Google CEO Eric Schmidt walked into the lion's den Tuesday as the closing keynote speaker of the Newspaper Association of America's annual conference. He got a polite reception from publishers who often blame him for their ongoing economic woes. He addressed head-on publishers' criticisms that Google unfairly makes money off other people's content, reminded the news executives they have the absolute power to keep their content out of the search giant's mix, and told them — as nicely as he could — that they stopped innovating online more than a decade ago. Google has become a big target lately, with public accusations from major media executives that the company is somehow contributing to the demise of the economically faltering newspaper industry by making money off its news portal and search, and in return only sending newspapers a mere one billion clicks a month.

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AP to Aggregators: We Will Sue You

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By John C Abell - Apr. 07 (News Report) - The Associated Press board voted Monday to "pursue legal and legislative actions" against aggregators who use content without permission, a new shot across the bow of internet news sites in the war over how little use is "fair use."

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A Web Site’s For-Profit Approach to World News

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Elizabeth Jensen - Mar. 23 (Special Report) - Overseas reporters have been a casualty of budget-chopping news organizations, leaving an opening for the online start-up GlobalPost. But at a time when many news executives are exploring nonprofit business models to keep specialized reporting flowing, GlobalPost, which made its debut on Jan. 12, is intended to be a moneymaking venture. With 65 correspondents worldwide — drawn from a surfeit of experienced reporters eager to continue working in their specialties even as potential employers disappear — GlobalPost has begun offering a mix of news and features that only a handful of other news organizations can rival.

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Officials Hoard Valuable Databases Funded by Taxpayers

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Mar. 20 (Special Report) - Government agencies across the country are sitting on gigabytes of valuable digital data that could be mashed, mixed and re-organized in crafty ways by Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and public interest groups engaged in everything from government oversight, to providing practical information to Americans. Yet, despite federal and state public records laws designed to make the data accessible, many agencies are fighting more ferociously than ever to keep data created with public funds out of public hands. In their battles to withhold information, bureaucrats are citing everything from copyright and trade secret privileges to privacy and national security concerns. And when they do provide data, some agencies charge exorbitant prices for it, ensuring it's only available to those with deep pockets.

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