I did a workshop/presentation for Globe and Mail reporters about Facebook this week, and I’ve embedded a version of the PowerPoint here (it’s on Slideshare too if you want to view it there). It’s not very long, nor does it go into a lot of depth about the various [...]
“We had difficulty reaching other users on the Bell apparatus, which Alexander Graham admits will have limited utility until they build a second Telephone. In comparison, the Telegraph network already has fifteen machines [...]
The recent cuts at the Washington Post — as reported by Politico and Washington’s City Paper — have once again brought to the surface a culture clash that has been going on in mainstream newsrooms for most of the last decade, and one that shows no sign of [...]
Updated:
Kurt Greenbaum has apologized for overreacting in his original response to this incident, although he doesn’t explicitly say that he is sorry for calling the school and indirectly causing someone to lose their job.
As someone whose job involves thinking about our social-media policies and our approach to comment behaviour, [...]
There’s been plenty of recent discussion about Rupert Murdoch and his “I’m taking my sites out of Google” campaign (which I mentioned in this post), and much of the debate centers around whether he is serious or just blustering. Jack Schafer at Slate seems to lean towards the [...]
It may have gotten lost amid the back-and-forth in the comments on her piece at the Columbia Journalism Review — many of which take her to task for criticizing “crowdfunding” startup Spot.us and its role in the Garbage Patch story the New York Times published recently [...]
Rupert Murdoch, that sly old rascal, caused a minor Twitter-storm recently, with an interview in which he suggested that News Corp. might remove its websites from Google, which he has described in the past as a “thief” that takes content without asking (Google, for its part, said that it [...]
Paul Carr, who started writing for TechCrunch not long ago, is an entertaining writer, and he often puts his finger on issues that others tend to avoid in their headlong rush towards whatever is shiny and new, which is why I’m glad Mike Arrington hired him. But I think his [...]
As anyone who has commented on a Globe and Mail story probably knows, we have a policy on what kinds of comments are appropriate and which ones are removed, but I confess that we haven’t always done a great job of communicating that policy clearly and consistently to our [...]
Megan Garber has a thoughtful and all-around excellent piece at the Columbia Journalism Review that looks at how mainstream media and several blogs handled a story about Justice Antonin Scalia and comments he made about a landmark anti-segregation ruling:
In the teeming world of the Web — one defined not [...]
Micah Sifry talks about how Atrios and Digby see the blogosphere evolving, and the rise of corporate blog entities.
Is political blogging no longer a place for the individual, crusading voice? Do you have to be part of a group blog, and ideally backed by a big media property, to [...]
Want to know why so many media outlets are excited about the idea of using Facebook Connect? Staci Kramer at PaidContent provides some clues in her interview with Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau:
At my request, HuffPo supplied some details: Facebook referral traffic is up 48 percent since the launch—and [...]
In looking to reconstruct journalism, [...]
As some of you may know, I was asked by the folks at Ryerson University’s Journalism School (one of my alma maters) to host/moderate a panel on “What’s Next For News” last week, as a kickoff for the school’s “Wordstock” event, and it was my pleasure to welcome Clay Shirky [...]
So I moderated a panel last night entitled “What’s Next For News,” as part of the kickoff for Wordstock, an annual event put on by the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto. As you can see from the photo (taken by Wayne MacPhail), I played middleman between veteran social-media [...]
No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible [...]
I was honoured recently by being asked to be one of the featured presenters at the first TEDx Toronto, a kind of mini-version of the famous TED conference that took place in at the Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto on September 10th (which also happened to be my birthday). The [...]
Since I became the first “communities editor” for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto almost a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes for a good community - a healthy community - and what makes for a bad one. I’ve looked at every [...]
Mike Masnick at Techdirt (who got profiled at CNET recently) writes about rapper 50 Cent’s approach to piracy:
Famed rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) was apparently on CNBC recently talking about his “business acumen.” I have to admit that having three different people all trying to interview him at once [...]
A few months ago, the mesh team — in other words, Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans, Stuart MacDonald, Mike McDerment and I — announced a new event we’re calling meshmarketing, a one-day series of keynotes, presentations and in-depth workshops about online and digital marketing ideas and tactics. During the summer [...]
Smith seems to have the whole CwF+RtB thing down cold — and has for many years. But, given all of that, I had no idea [...]
Turns out that these same sleazeballs also [...]
Gawker, the popular news aggregator network, has launched an aggregator for its internal sites. Users can specify what topics from each network they wish to see, and then they are given a unique url with that content aggregated.
There are two places news will be consumed in the future, editorially [...]
LONDON (Reuters) - Spotify, the much-hyped European digital music service, has secured a deal to launch a mobile offering on Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and phones using the Android platform, it said on Monday.
Sweden’s Spotify said a mobile application was now available for its premium subscribers in the UK, Sweden, [...]
The mesh team — i.e. me, Rob Hyndman, Stuart MacDonald, Mike McDerment, Mark Evans and our indispensable conference planner Sheri Moore — are pleased to announce the launch of meshmarketing.ca, the site that goes along with our new one-day marketing event. Meshmarketing takes place on October 22 at Circa, [...]
In yet another exhibit in the ongoing debate about what constitutes fair use online, Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira writes about how Gawker Media “ripped off” a recent story he wrote. In addition to this pejorative (and arguably also inaccurate) description, Shapira also uses a considerable helping of hyperbole [...]
I realize it’s entirely possible that virtually no one will read this post. I have been a very bad blogger recently, and wouldn’t be surprised if most people have given up on it. I would dearly love to be writing more, but just never seem to find the time.
I blame [...]
In what has to be one of the most often-quoted comments about an Internet company, billionaire basketball-team owner Mark Cuban said in 2006 that “only a moron would buy YouTube.” Within a matter of months, of course, Google paid $1.65-billion for the company that Mark said would undoubtedly be [...]
July 15, 2009 - Last week, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that “Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost,” and that they “no longer wish to be forced to [...]
July 15, 2009 - Last week, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that “Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost,” and that they “no longer wish to be forced to [...]
July 15, 2009 - Last week, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that “Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost,” and that they “no longer wish to be forced to [...]
July 15, 2009 - Last week, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that “Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost,” and that they “no longer wish to be forced to [...]
July 15, 2009 - Last week, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that “Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost,” and that they “no longer wish to be forced to [...]
It’s been more than a week since New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from his captors in Pakistan, so maybe now is a good time to try and look dispassionately at the massive coverup that prevented news of his kidnapping from being reported for more than six months [...]
I got an iPhone recently (no, not one of the fancy new ones) and so I asked people on Twitter and at work to tell me their absolute must-have favourite apps (I got an iPhone in part because the paper I work for has its own shiny new iPhone [...]
This is a just a quick note to congratulate my friend Om Malik and his team at GigaOm for launching a new service called GigaOm Pro — a for-pay research site that pulls together analysis on industry trends across a number of verticals, including mobile, green technology and so [...]
Computer-assisted reporting or CAR has been around, well — ever since there were computers. Even when I was in journalism school (which was longer ago than I care to remember), we learned about databases we could search, etc. But the explosion of Web-based tools and ways of sifting through [...]
This is an update to a recent post about the Wall Street Journal and its policies on Twitter use by its staff. In that post, I essentially agreed with a post by Jeff Jarvis in which he argued that the WSJ policy “missed the point” of social media in [...]
Staffers at the Wall Street Journal recently received an updated corporate conduct policy, including sections on how to behave when using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The response to the new rules of engagement, however, has been far from positive so far, with Jeff Jarvis saying [...]
Alan Rusbridger is the editor-in-chief of The Guardian, easily one of the most prestigious newspapers in the English-speaking world, and is widely admired as a journalist’s journalist. At the same time, he has also been one of the driving forces behind making his newspaper a leader online, which has [...]
Like a lot of newspapers and media outlets, the paper I work for in Toronto — the Globe and Mail — has been experimenting a lot with a great live-blogging and live-discussion tool called Cover It Live. The software comes from a company located in Toronto, but is [...]
Earlier this year, my friend and former Globe colleague Keith McArthur came up with the idea of celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Cluetrain Manifesto by having 95 people blog about the 95 theses that formed the core of the book. So he set up the Cluetrainplus10 [...]
In the aftermath of a horrible murder by someone who is now routinely referred to as “the Craigslist killer,” the online classified site has been coming under increasing pressure from both the government — which has been waging a prostitution-related crusade for some time now — and others [...]
Curation has become a popular term in media circles, in the sense of a human editor who filters and selects content, and then packages it and delivers it to readers in some way. Many people (including me) believe that, in an era when information sources are exploding online, aggregation and [...]
As many people probably know by now, Google came out with another of its Google Labs features on Monday: a Google News timeline view, which gives users the ability to see and scroll through headlines, photos and news excerpts by day/week/month/year. The sources of this data can also be [...]
As the newspaper industry has grown weaker and weaker, there has been a steady stream of articles and blog posts blaming Google for some or all of this decline. I’m not going to link to them all, because there are simply too many, and they are easy enough to find. [...]
The standard response from many people on Twitter this week to the news that Ashton Kutcher wanted to get a million followers was thinly veiled (or not-so-thinly veiled) disgust. Long-time Twitter fans were outraged that anyone — let alone a two-bit TV actor — would be so blatantly egotistical, and [...]
In the media industry, the name Steven Brill tends to bring back a lot of memories. The founder of CourtTV and Brill’s Content, he went on to create a new media entity called Inside, which was staffed with writers from Fortune and other leading publications. But the venture eventually folded. [...]
Gina M. Chen, a veteran journalist and editor who works at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., writes an excellent blog called “Save The Media,” which is aimed at helping journalists get used to some of the new tools in social media. Chen’s recent post, titled “10 ‘Journalism Rules’ [...]
After seeing recommendations on Twitter from Clay Shirky and others, I was expecting a tour de force from author and former Harvard Business Review editor Nick Carr, but I confess that I found his post on Google as middleman — and its effect on newspapers — disappointing. Not just [...]
I did a workshop about Twitter today for some of the journalists I work with at the Globe and Mail, and uploaded it to our internal wiki — and then I figured I might as well upload it to Slideshare so others could see it as well. I’ve embedded [...]
My apologies to regular readers for the scarcity of posts at this blog lately. Being “communities editor” at the Globe is taking up every minute I have and then some. I realize it’s not much, but here’s a recent post I wrote for the Nieman Journalism Lab
As almost everyone is [...]
There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the lineup at mesh ‘09 in April, but we are pleased to announce another very special one: a surprise appearance by Toronto mayor David Miller, who will be doing a one-on-one interview on April 8th, the second day of the conference [...]
The New York Times was the first major newspaper to take its cue from Google and open up its data via an API (which stands for application programming interface). In a nutshell, this allows developers to write programs that can automatically access the New York Times database, within certain limits, [...]
I’m on vacation at the moment, so blog posts — which have been all too infrequent of late — are likely to be even more infrequent, and may contain pictures of beaches and other non-work related content. In the interim, I’ve embedded in this post a clip of my recent [...]
A column by Judith Timson in the Globe and Mail this week got me thinking again (not like I ever really stop) about comments on blogs and news stories and other places, and the value that they bring. Judith’s column was in many ways a lament for the death [...]
There’s an interesting battle shaping up in the “hyper-local” online journalism market, at least in the New York and New Jersey area. The New York Times confirmed on Monday that it is launching a new project called The Local, in co-operation with journalism students at the City University of [...]
Some of you may have read — either here or elsewhere — about one of the social-media projects that I’ve been involved with at the Globe, a joint venture with the Dominion Institute known as the Public Policy Wiki. We started the wiki in January, as a way of [...]
I gave a short presentation at the Podcamp Toronto “unconference” a few days ago about some of the things we’re doing at the Globe and Mail (the national daily newspaper I work for in Toronto, for those of you from elsewhere), and a number of people asked me if I [...]
We’re really pleased to be hosting a stellar group of design, development and management thinkers (and do’ers) at meshU, the one-day Web tools conference that occurs just before the main mesh ‘09 conference this year (meshU is April 6 and the main mesh conference is April 7th and 8th). We [...]
Not a day goes by without someone adding their thoughts to the growing pile of opinion about what newspapers should do when it comes to charging for content online. The latest treatise comes from L. Gordon Crovitz, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal — whose opinion is notable [...]
TechCrunch, one of the Web’s top tech blogs, sparked a firestorm of criticism with a recent story about Last.fm — the popular music-sharing network that CBS acquired last year — by reporting that the service had turned over a pile of user information to the Recording Industry Association of [...]
Is it possible to be fascinated by an issue and yet tired of it at the same time? If so, then micropayments for online news pretty much fits that bill for me. I know that it’s a crucial time for the newspaper business (which pays my salary), and I know [...]
Users of social networks choose where to spend their time based on factors entirely outside of those such as uptime and reliability, according to report issued Tuesday (PDF link) by Pingdom, a service that tracks web site uptime and optimization for companies. Not that such things aren’t important — [...]
Alan Mutter is a former journalist-turned-entrepreneur who writes an excellent blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur, where he takes on various aspects of the newspaper industry from time to time. One of his recent posts, however, tries to make a point about the validity — or necessity — of [...]
When Twitter first hit my radar screen in 2007 sometime, I (like many others) immediately dismissed it as a gimmicky little time-waster with no real value. I mean, a message limit of 140 characters? Lame. And what was it for? Nothing, apparently. It was like the Facebook status message, but [...]
By now, many people — even those who aren’t on Twitter — have probably heard about an incident earlier this week involving a reporter at the National Post (a daily newspaper in Toronto) and a “Twitter meltdown” that he had, in which he posted half a dozen obscenity-laced messages directed [...]
It’s easy to spend a lot of time focusing on what’s wrong with the way newspapers and other media outlets are dealing with the Web, because let’s face it, there’s plenty of material (a great recent post along those lines is this one from Lectroid.net). But I [...]
Last year, we launched a new mesh event called meshU — a one-day series of speakers and workshops for developers, designers, project managers and anyone who builds online properties (or wants to) — and we got a great response to it from the Web community. We’re doing it again this [...]
If you’re not interested in the debate over micropayments and whether that will help save the newspaper industry, you’re probably not going to be interested in this post. If you are interested — as I am — you can find plenty of food for discussion in the links that follow. [...]
On Saturday, the “public editor” of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, published a long discussion of a story the newspaper had recently reported, and how problematic it was for the Times, and titled his column “Reporting in Real Time.” The original story was about how New York Governor [...]
There’s been a lot of chatter about the newspaper industry in recent weeks — about whether newspaper companies should find something like iTunes, or use micropayments as a way to charge people for the news, or sue Google, or all of the above — and how journalism [...]
As the financial pressures on newspapers continue to increase, the chorus of voices calling out for a new kind of payment scheme grow louder and louder. Some, like New York Times writer David Carr, have argued that newspapers should be able to concoct some form of “iTunes for news” [...]
Variations on the “Google should pay me for X” theme have been around for some time now, and the precipitous decline of content-related industries — among them book publishing, newspaper printing and music distribution, to name just a few — has only accelerated the number and frequency of these complaints. [...]
At the risk of being burned at the stake by my fellow journalists, I wanted to pass along a thought that occurred to me recently about the wave of layoffs and mass firings that has been rolling through newsrooms across North America — namely, what if this is actually a [...]
David Schlesinger, the editor-in-chief of Reuters News, has a fascinating post up at his blog, Full Disclosure — a fitting title, given the topic of the post. Schlesinger writes about how he has been Twittering from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and how his Twitter messages (or [...]
Jeff Jarvis doesn’t come right out and say it, but it’s pretty obvious why the former media executive, blogger and journalism professor chose to call his recent book What Would Google Do? It’s safe to say that Google isn’t just the flavour of the month, it’s the flavour of [...]
