Tag: online media

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Why Call it ‘Breaking’ or ‘Developing’ When it’s Not?

Call me easily perturbed by 24-hour news media shock lingo, but CNN and CNN.com can’t seem to post a story without having an alarming red bar over or under it, indicating either developing or breaking story.

Case in point, when Tiger Woods misses the cut at the British Open it is NOT a developing story. It IS a story and it may warrant being highlighted but there’s no reason to tease readers with the “developing” tag. It happened.

See CNN.com‘s current feature at left (as of 1:55pm PT, 7/17/09), along with my recommendation at right.

 

tiger woods misses cut at british open

 

Posted via web from Andy Sternberg’s posterous

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NYT Retires TimesSelect Pay Wall

new york times select now free foreverAnd all the greatest content shall be free!

No doubt Murdoch will open up WSJ.com to all as well. Both the Times and Journal were the only daily newspapers to successfully implement a paid subscription model, the Times reportedly generating over $20 million in revenue over the course of the two year TimesSelect experiment.

But the advertising landscape has changed, especially as ad sales models shift away from the pageviews to total time spent. This on the same day that AOL, which stands to benefit greatly from Nielsen’s total time spent measurements, announced a realignment of its ad strategy and a physical move from Dulles to Madison Avenue.

PaidContent breaks down the TimesSelect numbers here.

While I’m glad that I’ll no longer have to read another Frank Rich column out of context, cut-and-pasted on some random blog, I’m even happier that the excellent multimedia content on TS, as well as Kristof’s spin-off blogs (like this one written by my friend Will) will be free for the world to read.

So, are my beloved TimesSelect podcasts going to return… or what?

MORE: NYT;s letter to readers — the Pay Wall comes down at midnight EDT on the 19th. Also, Gillmor, Jarvis, and Ingram react.

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techPresident Wins $10,000 Knight-Batten Innovation in Journalism Award

Congrats to all of the excellent sites that placed in the 2007 awards (press release). I became familiar with techPresident after meeting Micah Sifry at EconSM and then examining the site further at the Knight New Media Center Tech & Politics Conference, which I blogged. My favorite parts of techPresident are the news aggregators by candidate and the charts detailing social network and Web 2.0 presence and support.

The First place, $2,000 winner is the much-deserving Council on Foreign Relations. Their Crisis guides, such as this one on Darfur, are excellent. It would appear CFR is going to take it from there in developing a more robust Web presence — I’ve noticed that they’ve been seeking Web producers throughout the summer.

Other notable sites that won awards/mentions:

— The Forum, an all-volunteer online newspaper for Deerfield, N.H.

— On Being, WaPo’s twist on NPR-style citizen narrated content, in video form. NOTE: The Post’s Jim Brady was among the dozen or so esteemed advisory board members judging the nominees.

— Assignment Zero, the first Pro-Am Journo project to come out of Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net initiative (I participated in editing a few articles and with this contribution).

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What Happened to TimesSelect Podcasts?

Recently I stopped receiving New York Times Op-Ed podcasts via iTunes and today I figured I’d investigate — perhaps they changed the URL or something.

However, the icon at left goes to a new NYT page, NYTimes.com Podcasts where there are no links to subscribe to readings of the daily Friedman, Kristof, Dowd, Krugman, or Brooks, whether or not I’m logged into my TimesSelect account. Am I somehow missing something?

When I subscribe to the feed, say Krugman’s podcast feed, the latest return is the August 3 podcast although his most recent column was August 20. Additionally, I can’t seem to find links to subscribe via Audible, the company that produced and published the op-ed podcasts. Perhaps just a burp in the Times’ transition to freeing up its TimesSelect content or are these Op-Ed podcasts gone for good? Say it ain’t so.