Twitter Engagement

Journalists and news organizations primarily use Twitter to broadcast links, and they rarely ask for audience input or retweet others.

A study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism focused on tweets by top newspapers, broadcasters, websites, and individual journalists.

The key finding is that news organizations use Twitter in limited ways. The main use being linking to their own material.

Ninety-three percent of tweets by news organizations link to their own articles while just two percent asked for audience input, and just one percent where retweets.

Individual journalists had about the same percentage of links and retweets.

Fox News had the most audience interaction on Twitter with 21 percent of tweets seeking feedback and 44 percent retweets.

Fox also increased its followers the most rapidly, maybe because of their Twitter interaction approach.

The New York Times had the least amount of audience interaction on Twitter.

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Paywalls: Newspaper's New Best Friend

Earlier this year, the New York Times set up a paywall to limit the number of free views people could have for their online articles. Many people believed this would be a complete failure thinking people would simply refuse to pay for online articles, but the New York Times has proved those non-believers wrong.

At the end of it's third quarter, released October 20, 20ll, the Times revealed a quarter of a million readers payed at least $15 to access the online content of this paper. This shows it is possible to make a profit by implementing the paywall strategy.

This is a huge success for now just the Times, but the journalism industry as a whole. Because the Times showed they could profit off their online content, it is expected that many other media outlets will follow their lead.

The success of the paywall helps ease the mind of those who believed newspapers to be a dying entity. Newspapers are not dying, they are simply evolving with the new technologies introduced to the world.

Although the paywall has the potential to benefit the journalism industry, what does this mean for readers? If other newspapers begin to charge for their online material, will readers still be able to access those breaking stories immediately? Or will this slow down the rate at which news travels?

The way in which the paywall strategy has been implemented by the Times will help keep casual readers interacting with the online content. The Times allows each person 20 views per month before they demand their payment. This allows those who are not news enthusiasts to view the few articles that catch their attention without first having to hand over their credit cards.

With it's success at the Times, it can be predicted that many other major news companies will set up paywalls similar to this one to help raise their profits. This will enable the journalism profession to keep up to speed with the fast paced world we now all live in.

photo by DRB62 from creativecommons.com

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Journalists are Killed in Times of War

A major controversy arose only a few weeks ago after details of an Afghan journalist's death surface.

BBC reporter, Ahmed Omed Khpulwak, was originally believed to be killed by insurgents in suicide attacks that had taken place July 28; nevertheless, recent discoveries have uncovered that Khpulwak was killed by an American soldier who had mistaken Khpulwak for a suicide bomber in the seemingly complex attacks that took place.

The foremost problem, however, is not that this journalist was killed in moments of war, but that the details of his death were not made known until after Khpulwak's family pressured for an investigation.

In an article published by the New York Times, details about the investigation report were provided.

The report stated that the soldier who killed Khpulwak believed that he had fired on American soldiers and was attempting to detonate a suicide vest when the soldier killed him. However, Khpulwak's brother states later in the article that he was skeptical of NATO's report since Khpulwak spoke sufficient English and would have simply been showing his press card to the soldiers.

Ther have been 19 other journalists killed in Afghanistan since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, according to the aformentioned article.

My question is, however, why this investigation seemed to have been swept under the rug. It took the family of the deceased to initially pressure the BBC to do something before the ball got rolling.

It would appear to me that it would be a present concern of those individuals who love to claim freedom, that if there is a suspicious death of an individual who is willing to ask difficult questions of those in power--such as a reporter--that those individuals would make it a point to seek out the truth.

This investigation should not have waited until September to turn-up results when Khpulwak was killed in July. If this is going to be the results of a journalist's death, fellow journalists need to make an outcry of anger, and soon.

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Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

The Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced and The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are among this year's winners.

The Los Angeles Times took home the public service award for their series on exposing corruption in Bell, California, where city officials were paying themselves large salaries in 2008.

The coverage led to several arrests and large-scale reform.

A photographer for The Los Angeles Times received the feature photography award for her photograph of bystanders caught in the crossfire of gang violence in Los Angeles.

New York Times reporters Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry won international reporting Pulitzer Prizes for putting "a human face on the faltering justice system in Russia, remarkably influencing the discussion inside the country."

New York Times' David Leonhardt won a commentary Pulitzer Prize for "his graceful penetration of America's complicated economic questions, from the federal budget deficit to health care reform."

Joseph Rago from The Wall Street Journal took home the Pulitzer for editorial writing for his piece on the new health care reform.

Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn and Ricky Carioti of The Washington Post won in the breaking news photography category for their work in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.

Paige St. John from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune won a prize for investigative reporting for an examination of the property insurance system in Florida.

ProPublica won the national reporting award for Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein's coverage of questionable practices on Wall Street. Last year, ProPublica was the first online news service to win a Pulitzer.

Amy Ellis Nutt from The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey won the feature writing Pulitzer for her coverage of the mysterious sinking of a commercial fishing boat that killed six people.

Others that were honored include novelist Jennifer Egan for her book "A Visit from the Goon Squad," playwright Bruce Norris for "Clybourne Park" and author Siddhartha Mukherjee for her nonfiction book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."

This year was the first time that no award was given for breaking news coverage.

The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded every year by the Pulitzer Prize Board at New York City's Columbia University. Categories honored include journalism, drama, poetry and books.

Each winner receives $10,000.

Photo credit: CreativeCommons.org

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New York Times Says "Not So Fast"

So, you thought you could get away with it didn't you? You figured out a way to get around that 20 article limit The New York Times will introduce in the U.S. next Monday. Well, it seems The New York Times has now said "Not so fast".

This new pay-wall system has a rule, if you get to a Times article by following a link it won't count against the 20 articles you get to read for free before paying a monthly subscription fee.

Of course, someone quickly introduced a twitter feed called @FreeNYTimes and it would be very resourceful for people looking for a way around it. The way it works is that person would have a subscription themselves and would have a link to every single New York Times article giving people the ability to use Twitter to get free articles.

"It is a violation of our trademark" said a representative for the Times and with that thought the Times has quickly countered this idea by asking Twitter to disable @FreeNYTimes.

Now is it really a trademark violation? Taking a look at the Twitter profile picture it has the distinctive Gothic "T" of the New York Times and the term "NYTimes" is identical to the newspaper's URL.

The Times may have a point now, but the name can easily be changed making it hard to press any trademark violation charges.

The Times' price is $35 per month to access the site on a computer, smartphone, and IPad while the computer only is $15. If the full package was $15 I believe a lot (and I mean a lot) more people would be willing to pay for the subscription.

So, What do you think? Is there a real trademark violation and do the prices for the subscription need to be adjusted?

I think the Times could simply avoid problems like this with a new plan. Make the pricing a good bit cheaper and people might be willing to pay for the subscription.

Photo Credit: businessinsider.com via Creative Commons

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The Times and Social News

It appears that The New York Times is getting more involved with the growing phenomenon of social news. According to the article entitled "Betaworks and The Times Plan a Social News Service" by Jenna Wortham, The Times is partnering with Betaworks to create a new social news site called News.me.

In the ever expanding world of online social media and news it would seem fitting that a journalism institution such as The Times would be getting involved with social news. My feeling is that as much as The Times may or may not want to, they have to get on board with online social news. Sites like Twitter have forever changed the landscape of journalism by creating this instant source for breaking news that, in some ways, has helped kill off print newspapers: see Seattle Post-Intellingencer and Rocky Mountain News.

This collaboration between Betaworks, who are the creators of TweetDeck and Bit.ly, and The New York Times has been in the works for the past six months according to the article by Wortham. Not many details have been released about the site to this point which keeps the mystery intact.

When you direct yourself to the News.me site there is nothing more than a placeholder as a web page. However judging by the name of the site, one can only imagine the possibilities it may provide to the media consumer.

Initially it is said that News.me will debut as an IPad application and a web version may be introduced at a later date.

You may ask what does this do for newspapers and social media moving forward? It seems to this blogger that News.me is only another exciting tool that is coming available to journalists and the public in general. It remains to be seen what effect this venture and others of its kind will ultimately have on the newspaper industry. However with newspapers getting into the fold, it would seem that they are doing their best to change and evolve with today's ever changing society.

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What are Topic Pages You Ask?

In searching for a topic for my Beginning Newswriting Class at Simpson College regarding journalism in the news I came across article by Maurreen Skowran called, "How Topic Pages can give Readers a Bird's-Eye View of the News" on PoynterOnline. The words "topic pages" caught my eye, but then I wondered what topic pages were

Basically what topic pages are is summaries of new stories. This always people to get caught up on the news quicker.

In a study commisioned by the Associated Press in 2008 showed that adults between the ages of 18 and 24 experiance "new fatigue" because we are continually supplied updates but lack the meat of the story.

Topic pages include summaries to stories, but also include links that the original story might not have.

But will they work? In December and January of this past year Google did an experiment with the help of The New York Times and The Washington Post called the "Living Stories." In this experiment each topic had a summary that was approximately five paragraphs long. The ending result showed that 75 percent preferred the "Living Stories" over regular online news stories.

This is a wonderful idea! Who has time these days to read the paper from front to back anymore. We want the information that we feel we need and we want it as quick as possible, easy to read, and links to answer any new questions we might have.

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Top Ten Journalism Pieces

New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute chose the top ten journalism pieces from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2009. The winning pieces are:

1. The New York Times',"A Nation Challenged," Fall 2001
2. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, 2003
3. Lawrence Wright's, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, 2006
4. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson's, This American Life & NPR: "The Giant Pool of Money," May 2008
5. C.J. Chivers (reporter), Dexter Filkins (reporter) and Tyler Hicks' (photographer), The New York Times, 2003-2009
6. Jane Mayer's, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, 2008
7. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 2001.
8. The Times-Picayune staff's, New Orleans, La. Coverage of Hurricane Katrina, August-December 2005
9. Anne Hull, Dana Priest (reporters) and Michel du Cille's, (photographer)"Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army's Top Medical Facility," February 2007, The Washington Post
10. Walter Robinson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll, Stephen Kurkjian, Tom Farragher, Michael Paulson, Kevin Cullen, Ben Bradlee Jr., Mark Morrow's, "Abuse in the Catholic Church," The Boston Globe, 2002

Descriptions of each piece can be found here.

Faculty from the institute, as well as other journalist, including: Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz; Morley Safer of “60 Minutes”; and Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Leon Dash, a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign comprised the panel that determined the winners. The top ten pieces reflect the passage of time from 2000 - 2009.

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Meet the Magazine of the Future

VIVmag released several videos of their new iPad application last week. The completely digital magazine was featured in The New York Times as a "taste of digital reading's future," but according to Sarah Perez many still had doubts of its cost.

Since VIVmag is already an online magazine, it was not hard for them to make the switch to video rather than just photos. Creating this digital content costs about as much as making a print issue, and the magazine has created reusable templates to speed up the process.

This video shows how VIVmag will create their interactive story

VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread - iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

Zinio, the magazine's distributor, will also be creating an iPad application for publishers that do not want to make their own. Through this app readers will be able to easily find and subscribe to different magazines through an online "newsstand".

VIVmag has definitely found a great way to keep readers interested with a flashy app, but will users pay for content like this?

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Google...not a Media Company?

Although Google continues to reinforce that they are not a media company, last week they seemed to postion themselves with newspapers and television news shows. In David Carr's article in The New York Times, he calls this "the greatest fight over freedom of expression in years."

Last week Google announce that its division would be exiting China and moving to Hong Kong. China has strict senorship laws that are enforced by their govenment.

It will be interesting to watch as the future reveils itself, as conutries like, Austria, Itlay, and South Korea would like Google to monitor their access to some degree also. By walking away from China, and the vast opportunities there, it will be hard to see them standing for other restrictions.

How forgetful we can be when it comes to our right for the freesdom of expression and free press as residents of the United States.

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