Even impressive, this demo of what Time Inc is working on, apparently for the coming Apple tablet.
Archive for the ‘Undercurrent in English’ Category
Quite hübsch
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009The welcome comeback of the image
Saturday, November 28th, 2009The internet saved our culture of writing, it has often been claimed. The image saturation caused by television had, in this narrative, reached dangerous levels by the mid 1990s. Enter the commercial internet with email and the web. At the latest with web 2.0, everyone is writing all the time. Hurrah!
People like David McCandless bring a fresh approach to question this now received wisdom. By visualising data instead of just referring to them in text, modern infographics can be more enlightening than acres of text, not less:
I’ve spent the last year exploring the potential of information visualisation for my website and a book. I’ve taken loads of information and made it into simple, colourful and, hopefully, beautiful “visualisations” – bubble charts, concept maps, blueprints and diagrams – all with the minimum of text. I don’t just mean data and statistics. I love doing this with all kinds of information – ideas, issues, stories – and for all subjects from pop to philosophy to politics. Personally, I find visualisations great for helping me understand the world and for sifting the huge amounts of information that deluge me every day.
More of his visualisations can be enjoyed at his Flickr page.
Information and data visualisation has come to seem increasingly important to me as I in the past few months have spent a lot of time on the topic of opening up data in government (project blog in Norwegian). Clearly, it’s possible to do harm with data, as it is with all kinds of information. But the solution in an open society cannot be to lock down government data. That’s why it’s so important to have an ongoing discussion about how data can be used to promote better understanding of society, like McCandless does with his infographics. That he helps to improve journalism at the same time, isn’t actually a drawback these days.
Anhängsel
Monday, November 9th, 2009Das Altpapier survives Netzeitung — who would have thought that? Today, punctual as ever with the commented overview of the media coverage of Netzeitung’s end. And with a logical conclusion:
Vielleicht musste die Netzeitung zu oft mitwandern, war zu oft Anhängsel und durfte sich zu wenig selbst bewegen, um sich als printzeitungsunabhängiges und rentables Onlineangebot etablieren zu können. Dabei hatte es an einer Wegmarke 2001 nicht so schlecht dafür ausgesehen: Damals, im November, gehörte die Netzeitung, direkt hinter Spiegel Online und noch vor Bild.de, zu den meistbesuchten Onlinenachrichtenseiten.
And in Netzeitung itself, the story “Aus für die Netzeitung” has disappeared from the media page, though it is still to be found in the archive.
UPDATE: Taz obit.
Automatisiert
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
I registered the domain name Netzeitung.de on October 5, 1999. So although the website wasn’t launched before a year later (soft launch in September for the Olympics, official launch November 8), in a way you can say that Germany’s first online-only newspaper just managed to reach the 10-year mark. It looks like the current owner M. DuMont Schauberg will keep the domain name, but the website as journalistic product will be history from January 1, 2010. The press release, for the record:
Aus wirtschaftlichen Gründen wird das bisherige Konzept einer Internetzeitung mit eigener Redaktion zum 31. Dezember 2009 aufgegeben. Aus diesem Grund wird sämtlichen Mitarbeitern in Kürze betriebsbedingt gekündigt werden. Bestehende vertragliche Verpflichtungen der Internetzeitung werden noch im 1. Quartal 2010 erfüllt. Es wird geplant, zukünftig die Netzeitung als automatisiertes Nachrichtenportal zu nutzen. Die NZ-Teletextaktivitäten sind davon unberührt und sollen in Zukunft eine stärkere Rolle in der Gruppe spielen. Wir bedauern die für die Mitarbeiter mit der Entscheidung verbundenen Härten. In der derzeitigen Form ist die Internetzeitung wirtschaftlich aber nicht zu betreiben.
I wonder if being “automated” is almost worse than just being closed. A fitting irony: The news reached me via the “automated” news and social media site Rivva.
Obits at Carta and Onlinejournalismus.de. I guess there will be more. But I have some nicer reading for you: Spiegel’s story “News and more” from the heydays in 2000. And here’s the list of my own blog posts mentioning netzeitung.de.
Real-time challenge
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Bjarke Myrthu sees a business opportunity for “old media” in “the challenge of the age” identified by Google’s Eric Schmidt: Learning how to rank user-generated, real-time information. Bjarke:
Part of what he calls “real-time social content” is what old media is calling “breaking news”. In other words Google is working hard at becoming the best at collecting and organizing breaking news produced by all of us. While most of us had no idea what Google was about to do first time around (I remember thinking it was a great service but too bad they would never make money), this time around the Newspapers and the rest of the media industry actually have a chance to compete. Why should the best brands in old media not be able to create a great search technology and future business model for breaking news?
Advice for the multimedia journalist
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Adam Westbrook has written a practical, little booklet about multimedia & freelance journalism. Among the useful tips, for me:
The worst thing a multimedia journalist can do when producing video for the web is to replicate television – unless that’s your commission of course. TV is full of rules and formulas, all designed to hide edits, look good to the eye, and sometimes decieve. Fact is, online video journalism provides the chance to escape all that. Sure it must look good, but be prepared to experiment – you’lll be amazed what people will put up with online.
And of course it’s CC-licensed.
Time, money and skill
Monday, October 19th, 2009ProPublica editor Paul Steiger is fairly optimistic on behalf of investigative journalism in the web era:
Last year, a 20-something, self-taught Internet genius named Amanda Michel mobilized hundreds of politically active citizens to supply info for her “Off the Bus” report on the Huffington Post Web site. When Candidate Obama voiced the notion that some folks who were losing out in the global economy were clinging to such things as religion and guns to compensate, Michel’s network captured it and we soon all heard about it. Without that network, we might never have known, because reporters weren’t invited into the area where Mr. Obama spoke. Michel now works for ProPublica and has put together a team of more than 2,200 volunteers who will do similar reporting for us. This army permits us, for instance, to track progress on 500 representative federal stimulus projects in real time, even though our own news staff numbers just 32.
We will still need journalists’ special skills:
The process of finding and communicating what we used to call news may no longer require newspapers-at least not as we have known them, as seven-day-a-week, ink-on-paper compendiums of new information on a broad range of subjects. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill.
PicApp seriously improved
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
PicApp is an idea I’ve liked from the start: Professional news photography being made available to everyone, via embedding like the Afghanistan photo here. In the first phase the service didn’t work so well, so I ended up not using it that often. But the new version has serious improvements. Now embed code in different sizes is directly available (no login necessary), and photo presentation is better as well. Advertising is only displayed — as far as I understand — when you click on a photo.
A story at ReadWriteWeb clarifies some of the questions bloggers might have — se especially the comments.
Guardian hiring “beatbloggers” for local project
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009From the Guardian’s digital content blog:
Starting with Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, guardian.co.uk is planning to launch a local news project in a small number of locations. At the moment guardian.co.uk is looking for bloggers – with journalistic qualifications “desirable” – to help cover community news, and report on local developments. The project will emphasise local political decision-making, and is scheduled to go live next year.
The job description for bloggers:
Working from your home, or anywhere with WiFi, as a ‘beatblogger’ you will lead the Guardian’s innovative approach to community news coverage in Leeds. This will include reporting on local meetings and events with an emphasis on local political decision making, identifying issues of importance to local residents and signposting information and news provided via other sources. You will be willing to collaborate with others to create a vital resource for the city.
The transformation from nerd to political animal
Monday, September 21st, 2009If you have any point of contact with German cultural-political debates, you’re going to hear more about Frank Schirrmacher’s text in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine. I’m not going to explain anything about his peculiar position in the German media landscape; if you have any points of contact, you will have heard enough about him anyway. Though one should always screen carefully for irony and double meanings, I grant myself the license to read the text as a mainly straightforward analysis of the position of the “nerd” (as ideal type, as it were), that is, what the nerds have accomplished and why they are now stepping into the political realm:
Ihrem Wesen nach sind Nerds individualistisch. Aber sie sind Individualisten, die dank der digitalen Technologie die größte Vernetzungsstufe der Menschheitsgeschichte möglich gemacht haben: Vernetzung einzelner Subjekte, die ihren Charakter und ihre Individualität bewahren können, nicht nach ihrem Äußeren beurteilt werden, nicht nach ihrem Geschlecht, nicht nach ihrem Diplomatenkoffer oder ihrer Jute-Tasche. Die Organisation ist so geschlechtsneutral, wie es das Internet ist. Das erklärt, wieso sie politisch geweckt wurden, als die Grundregeln bedroht zu sein schienen. Und das macht sie wichtig und notwendig.
The nerds are about to transform themselves into political animals, and the real importance is disclosed in this paragraph:
Die Fragen, die aus Verhaltenssteuerung und Voraussage sich ergeben, aber auch die Abhängigkeit des modernen Menschen von unverstandenen Algorithmen sind Kernfragen der gesellschaftlichen Zukunft. Sie werden nicht weggehen und nicht ein für alle Mal gelöst werden können. Aber es ist entscheidend, dass man erkennt, dass die Informationsgesellschaft auf andere Weise, aber mit ähnlicher Dramatik unser Leben revolutioniert, wie es einst die Maschinenparks des industriellen Zeitalters taten.
A detail, but not irrelevant in the context: I found the article at carta.info, not the FAZ.
Fast Flip is fun, but no giant step for publishers
Friday, September 18th, 2009The latest idea to emerge from Google’s labs is Fast Flip, a new way of speed-browsing through news and current affairs websites. You should try it, it’s fun and easy to see the potential. I’ve already discovered many good stories and had a new look at forgotten sites. Serendipity, like browsing a good magazine rack in a kiosk, but much faster.
Some media observers see a significant shift in that Google will share revenue from the ads shown with the content, but this must be an exaggeration. How could Google not share revenue when they are displaying whole pages from other publishers’ websites? This surely goes beyond the usual search engine indexing. Google not sharing revenue here would make publishers call their lawyers — and this time rightly so.
Good weekend flipping!
The post-paper newsroom
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
The photo says almost all, but make sure to read Nieman Journalism Lab’s text about The Ann Arbor Chronicle as well:
There’s no fixed publication schedule for full-length stories, said Morgan, a former business and opinion editor for the defunct News. Rushing to get the story first is outdated and doesn’t really matter to readers, she said. “The assumption is, well, we’re going to get it done as soon as we can given everything else we’ve got going,” she said. (my emph.
(Nieman Lab is published with a CC by-nc license, like this blog).
Twingly with Solution for information overload?
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009Twingly gives a first description of their new tool, Twingly Channels:
A Twingly Channel acts as a social filter on top of feeds and realtime search, allowing you to set up a social memetracker for any topic or event. The underlying idea is that by aggregating feeds and realtime search results into a channel where many people sharing the same interest can discuss and vote on the content (while also providing a filter to solve the prevalent problem of information overflow) we lower the learning curve to the realtime web.
The reason I find this exciting is that the paragraph above describes with 100 percent accuracy what I have been looking for for a long time. It’s impossible to determine from the screenshots if this is it, but they definitely raise expectations. So thinks TechCrunch.
How expensive is quality journalism?
Monday, August 31st, 2009Good information about how much quality journalism really costs is strangely difficult to come by. So thanks to Zachary Seward for sharing a few examples with us, prompted by the ProPublica/New York Times 13,000 word Katrina magazine story:
In this case, Fink was paid $33,000 plus $10,000 in expenses for her Kaiser fellowship, according to Steve Engelberg, her editor at ProPublica, where she’s been for 14 months. Engelberg, who was kind enough to go through these figures with me, said, “Fourteen months of salary plus benefits for us easily gets you north of 100 plus, 100, 150 or something.” He threw in another $20,000 to $30,000 for travel expenses, in addition to three months of editing and lawyering at ProPublica and the Times, which also spent $25,000 to $30,000 on photographs, he said.
UPDATE: A more detailed breakdown in Mother Jones. 10.000 for fact-checking? Wow.
Probably most news organizations prefer to keep such numbers for themselves, or maybe they don’t even break them down in much detail. A good thing about a crisis in journalism: It would probably expose the real costs.
And now I have to read the Katrina story — and wonder if any Norwegian newspaper will foot the translation bill and re-publish it, which they can after Sept. 29.
British government planning internet cut-off
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009After the French come the Brits: Three strikes or internet cut-off as punishment for illegal filesharing was not included in the Digital Britain report, but now the government wants it after all:
…Today the government will take the unusual step of proposing much stricter rules midway through the Digital Britain consultation process. Illegal filesharers will still get warning letters but if they continue to swap copyrighted material they could have their internet connection temporarily severed, although it may be possible to retain basic access to online public services. A similar law in France under which filesharers could be cut off for up to a year was recently kicked out by the country’s highest court as unconstitutional. In the UK, privacy groups are likely to challenge any similar legislation as contrary to human rights law.
“Basic access to online public services” is cute.
