Google News Timeline

Mathew Ingram looks at the brand new Google News Timeline and wonders: Why can’t newspapers exhibit this kind of creativity?

Google News Timeline is very impressive, offering users the abililty to look at news by days, weeks, months, years and even decades in a visually appealing column format. You can also refine your search according to a particular news source.

Ashton Kutcher, king of Twitter

At Nieman Journalism Lab, Mathew Ingram looks at criticism of Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN to become the first with a million followers on Twitter. And he concludes that “Far from being just an egotist who wants to take advantage of a medium to promote himself,” Kutcher has something to teach us about the evolution of media:

As a celebrity who is in the public eye almost all the time, he also has a somewhat unique take on the media industry and how it is being transformed.

 

In his video discussion with Oprah about Twitter, for example, Kutcher says he believes that “we’re at a place now with social media where a single person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire news network — that is the power of the social web.” (although obviously it helps if that one person is a celebrity). He then talks about how his life is “somewhat on display anyway, and not always by choice… so instead of them publishing pictures and videos I don’t like, I can publish pictures and video of myself… that I’m happy with. If there’s some sort of fallacy that’s out in some magazine or that some blogger has written about, you can respond to it, and you can actually respond to it in a genuine way, directly with your fans, as opposed to having to go through the whole rigamarole of publicists and so on.”

Better than micropayments: packaging the news

The more the debate about paying for online news content rages on, the more I’m inclined to agree with some of the sharp commentary on Mathew Ingram’s recent look at the micropayment issue, comments that have served to focus my ideas about what news sites can and cannot charge for.

What they can charge largely depends on what consumers need. On that issue, Terry Steichen believes they require context:

Newsosaur roars at the BuzzMachine

Alan Mutter clearly thought he had Jeff Jarvis right where he wanted him. In a recent post on Reflections of a Newsosaur, Mutter all but accused Jarvis of being a hypocrite.

Jarvis, as you might know, has long advocated for finding ways to monetize online news content apart from directly charging for it. Recently on his BuzzMachine blog, he  ridiculed David Carr’s iTunes for newspapers proposal, stating:

New York Times: Get it right before you get it first

New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt was a credit to his paper this past weekend when he essentially admitted that the Times screwed up in publishing anonymous quotes in a story about Caroline Kennedy’s withdrawal from consideration for the Senate seat in New York:

On Jan. 22, the day after Kennedy withdrew, [Times reporter] Hakim received one of the calls from the [Gov. David] Paterson camp, and at 2:52 p.m., an article appeared on the paper’s Web site under the headline, “Taxes and a Housekeeper Are Said to Derail Kennedy’s Bid.” It quoted the anonymous source as saying that Paterson “never had any intention of picking Kennedy because it was clear that she wasn’t ready for prime time. She had botched her rollout. She was unprepared. She clearly had no policy experience and couldn’t handle the pressure of the public stage.” The article had no more information about the tax and housekeeper problems than was in the headline.

As Hoyt explains, Times staff felt the pressure to keep up with the New York Post, which had just posted a story about Kennedy nine minutes earlier. In its haste, the Times did a disservice to Kennedy and its readers.

But Mathew Ingram, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, saw the gaffe and subsequent reader reaction as a case of news business “evolving online in real time“:

But to me, the Kennedy story evolved exactly as many stories evolve in real-time online. … Readers complained to Hoyt within minutes of the story appearing, as did some other NYT editors, and as a result the story was broadened and more fact-checking was done.

That to me is a success.

It is indeed a positive that more fact-checking was done as a result of reader and editor complaints, and that the story was enhanced with quotes disputing the source’s account. But that doesn’t mitigate the basic cause of those complaints: that the Times had violated its own Confidential News Sources Policy:

We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.

Hoyt quotes Bob Steele, ethicist at Poynter Institute, who sums up the issue correctly in my opinion:

“Competitive fervor is not a justifiable ethical value.”

Former CEO of CNN wants his micropayments

Remember that New York Times article by David Carr calling for an “iTunes for news?” Well, former CNN CEO Walter Isaacson, in a speech delivered a couple days ago, agrees:

But I don’t think that subscriptions should be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants a copy of one day’s edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under the current payment systems. The key for attracting online revenue, I think, is coming up with an iTunes-easy, quick micropayment method.

Isaacson then runs down a list of existing micropayment services and describes how one could be implemented for online news sites:

Will newspaper layoffs force the industry to the Web?

Mathew Ingram at Nieman Journalism Lab asks whether the “wave of layoffs and mass firings” that have hit the newsrooms might actually be a good thing:

In order to agree with me, you would have to admit that there are a lot of newspapers (and I know of many personally) that haven’t been moving quite as quickly as they might towards an online future.

…What better way to force some change than by administering a large but hopefully non-lethal shock to the system?

Also underlying Ingram’s argument is the assumption that the move to online is inevitable and ultimately better for the industry: