Tag Archives: analysis

The Heart of Content Management

The Heart of Content Management. “As soon as the tools we use to publish our sites start to equal the class, skill and nuance we the writers are expected to put into “the content” on our sites, then we can start to truly consider ourselves publishers in the digital age. Until then, digital will always be second to print.”

Key departures suggest 4 factors critical to the future of programming and journalism

Key departures suggest 4 factors critical to the future of programming and journalism. Both Matt Waite and Jeremy Bowers are out at the St. Petersburg Times. Factors influencing data journalism at larger news organizations:

  • News apps challenge longstanding perceptions of who owns technology within a media company.
  • Regardless of who is placed in what department, developers and journalists must be able to collaborate so they can create new tools.
  • News organizations will have to emphasize project management and product development if they hope to compete with digitally-native information companies.
  • News organizations must truly support risk-taking in order to see its rewards.

Excellent state of the field analysis. All challenges to solve.

Tuesday night distraction: Versioned Data Carnival of Journalism

A few days back, Saturday to be exact, the crazy notion I should spend dozens of hours doing content analysis on The Locals came to my mind. For my Carnival of Journalism blog post, I want to paint a clear picture of what university-sponsored hyperlocal journalism is like today. This can then be a foundation for any bushy-eyed speculation I might do about the future.

Sunday evening, I created a Github repository for two reasons: to see how my code is evolving and to track step by step how I’m putting this data together. After all, journalism must be reproducible.

Now that it’s closer to deadline, I want to open the floor. What data points would you like to see established about The Locals? As of right now, I know that the LEV (Local East Village) produced 100 blog posts in November 2010 from 29 authors and 19 community contributors. The FGCH (Fort Greene-Clinton Hill) produced 105 blog posts in November 2010 from 23 authors and 23 community contributors. The rest of the questions I’ve established are in my research notes.

P.S. Another part of the experiment is to see how well Git works as a versioned authoring tool.

“Twitter became popular before it had a mission”

An apt, 10,000 foot level view of the evolution of Twitter from Mr. Cody Brown (emphasis his):

Twitter became popular before it had a mission. What this means is that its employees and investors will forever be trapped in boardrooms having these inane cyclical discussions about its identity. Twitter will either perpetually be simple insofar as its millions of users will have to hack the service to reflect their own values or it will roll the dice on a focus, put the site through chronic redesigns, and risk a mass user exodus. Either way its top talent will likely get frustrated and leave the company. Its top users will drift to something else then jump.

I generally try not to get sucked into the discussion about Twitter, its values, what it’s useful for, etc. and Cody finally articulated why: it’s a tool with unique characteristics that has been bootstrapped into many different uses. Those that I can identify are ease of use over SMS, 140 character limitation for messages, asynchronous user relationships, and “push”-esque notification system. It’s just a matter of time before other tools appear with potentially the same characteristics but are designed to solve the communication needs of a better defined community.

Daily Emerald on strike, and the evolution of the newspaper

Around 8:30 this morning, Kai Davis (or @ninjakai) twittered something about the Oregon Daily Emerald being on strike. The initial image in my mind was one of people picketing in the street, and I couldn’t honestly guess as to what they would be striking about.

Then I read the editorial.

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