The Cult of Me

How Social Technologies Will Save the Story

4 Thoughts on Design

My main point is that the tradeoffs should usually be skewed further in the direction of “Obvious” than we care to think. (Don’t Make Me Think, p 14)
I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about the editorial side of digital news, but that’s only part of the story. In fact, it’s not even half [...]

Newspapers v. the Web: 2 Choices, 1 Answer

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Of the 23 percent who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape.(July 20, 2006, The Pew Center for the People and the Press: Online Newspapers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership)
I’ve [...]

4 Steps to Create A Modern News Story

(The) “big successes” on the Internet, Web sites such as YouTube, have content that’s 95 percent generated by the public. Content on the Tribune’s site is 97 percent house generated, just 3 percent public — the comment boards and photos. (June 18, 2008, Chicago Reader: Will Newspapers Survive?)
There is a disturbing construct I’ve noticed in [...]

5 Reasons the Story is Dead

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The past few days have transformed my thinking about the future of journalism. For the first time since I started this project, I had time to sit, contemplate and read what other people far smarter than me had to say — not about journalism, but about the way we work in the modern [...]

Book Review: Groundswell (Part 2)

Note: Groundswell is a wonderful road map for how — and why — you should implement social technologies. This review both pulls out some pertinent facts that I find relevant and has stories specific to newspapers that I think would be helpful for those working in online news operations. To get the full scope of [...]

Book Review: Groundswell (Part 1)

Image by glenn.batuyong via Flickr

Note: Groundswell is a wonderful road map for how — and why — you should implement social technologies. This review both pulls out some pertinent facts that I find relevant and has stories specific to newspapers that I think would be helpful for those working in online news operations. To get [...]

Book Review: The Wisdom of Crowds (Part 2)

Note: This is maybe the most important book I’ve read for my research. This review is going to be long and exhaustive. So, I’m breaking it up into multiple parts. You can read Part 1 here.
Surround Yourself with Overconfident Dissenters: “Overconfident people don’t do that. They tend to ignore public information and go on their [...]

Book Review: The Wisdom of Crowds (Part 1)

Note: This is maybe the most important book I’ve read for my research. This review is going to be long and exhaustive. So, I’m breaking it up into multiple parts. Read Part 2 here.

I spent the day reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, one the books in my reading list and one of the [...]

3 Ways Hard Fun Can Sell Hard News

Hard Fun.
The first time I came across the concept was when I was reading chapter 16 of Nicholas Negroponte’s best-selling book Being Digital back in the late nineties. The idea is simple: kids will learn much more — and much more easily — if you create games and challenges and then allow them to fail, [...]

6 Reasons the BBC Gets the Web

I’ve loved the BBC for many years.
If I had a dream job it would living somewhere in England working with their digital teams and thinking up new ways to get people information. They are the model for what should be done.
Before we go any farther down the line, I realize their business and management structure [...]

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