NewsTrust - New Media - Most Recent Stories: News

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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At the NPR and PBS unconference, 2009 is the year of “We, the media”

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Digiphile - By Digiphile - Oct. 19 (News Report) - “TV, radio and pro journalism still matter in this new ecosystem”-John Boland, PBS. This past weekend, I attended Public Media Camp, an unconference at American University in Washington, D.C. I came away from the two days of sessions, talks, informal discussions, random encounters and rapid-fire information exchange inspired, exhilarated and a bit exhausted. That last is why it took a day to get a post up. By its nature, I couldn’t go to everything. What I did attend, I tried to take notes upon and livestream to Livestream.com and uStream. When it comes to the archiving that video, unfortunately, I endured two crashes and suffered from the lack of a decent mic. Happily, much better video will be coming online from other sources over the next week. What follows are my thoughts, links and video from “Pubcamp.”

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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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Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Erica Naone - Sep. 04 (News Report) - The official motto of the Internet could be "don't believe everything you read," but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust. A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.

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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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FCC Apparently Not Very Concerned About Consumer Views On Broadband | Techdirt

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

techdirt.com - By Mike Masnick - Aug. 14 (News Analysis) - This definitely seems like politics as usual. And it's a problem, not just for the FCC, but for the very businesses involved in these discussions. Ignoring consumer will these days is increasingly a suicide pact. The businesses leading this discussion would be well-served to look at what's happening in other industries (music, newspapers) where business execs have been trying to ignore consumers' rights and interests

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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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Senator Sanders Unfiltered

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Sen. Bernie Sanders - Aug. 10 (News Report) - Nowadays you don't need to be a senator or a CEO or a celebrity to have a voice in the media, and if you happen to be a senator, a CEO or a celebrity, you have a thousand people each with their own respective audiences to hold you accountable. And as we all have come to learn only too well, there are plenty of senators and CEOs (maybe not celebrities) that need badly to be held to account. It is in this new media ecosystem that we wage our national debates over critical issues like health care reform, global warming, the war in Afghanistan and the collapse of the American middle-class. In this complex and exciting landscape, democratic debate isn't just a two-way street, it's five intersecting eight lane highways.

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Is Google Killing General Knowledge?

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

moreintelligentlife.com - By Brian Cathcart - Aug. 05 (Special Report) - The average student, though better-informed than the earl’s daughter appears to be, seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact, committing it to memory, does not seem to be a consideration.

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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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Cyber media Vs Print Media of Pakistan: A war within

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

chowrangi.com - By Hina Safdar - Jul. 30 (News Analysis) - Media in Pakistan has grown after mushrooming of private TV channels and we have seen number of journalists becoming analysts, hosts and opinion-makers, making and breaking public image of their followers. On the other hand, cyber space has been getting populated in our country since last few years as people started to get into blogging and making their mark by commenting and participating in discussions.

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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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Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism?

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mashable - By Leah Betancourt - Jul. 18 (Special Report) - Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news. A new crop of sites are combining crowdfunding with volunteer and professional contributions in order to source news that people want to read.Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news. A new crop of sites are combining crowdfunding with volunteer and professional contributions in order to source news that people want to read.

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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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