Last year BBC News online trialled technology from Apture, which created pop-up windows to wikipedia pages, youtube and relevant articles from certain hyperlinks.
The big hope of the Treasury plan is that the private sector will be willing to pay a higher price for leveraged assets than it would for unleveraged assets.
Here’s a survey of today’s ledes from some of the nation’s top newspapers about President Obama’s intentions to toughen fuel economy standards for automakers. The Wall Street Journal offers the most specific opening graf, while the Washington Post and New York Times do a good job of contextualizing the announcement. The Los Angeles Times lede, on the other hand, is syntactically jarring, sacrificing clarity and accessibility for conjecture and information that could have been included further down in the article:
The Obama administration plans to order auto makers to increase the fuel economy of automobiles sold in the U.S. to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, four years faster than current federal law requires, people familiar with the matter said.
The Obama administration today plans to propose tough standards for tailpipe emissions from new automobiles, establishing the first nationwide regulation for greenhouse gases.
President Obama will announce tough new nationwide rules for automobile emissions and mileage standards on Tuesday, embracing standards that California has sought to enact for years over the objections of the auto industry and the Bush administration.
The Obama administration is set to announce Tuesday what will amount to a sweeping revision to auto-emission and fuel-economy standards, putting them in the same package for the first time.
The agreement that the Obama administration will announce today forcing dramatic reductions in vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and improvements in auto mileage marks a potentially pivotal shift in the battle over global warming — and a vindication of California’s long battle to toughen standards.
The Wall Street Journal plans to start a micropayments service for individual articles this fall. Let the echo-chamber pooh-poohing begin! (Quote below is from Jeff Jarvis; emphasis is mine):
So if the Journal brings on micropayment, I fear for them that they’ll lose doubly. They’ll lose my subscription. They’ll lose my even occasional readership and the ad revenue that can come with that. They will, in a cruel irony, replace digital dollars with micro pennies.
Or, conversely, WSJ could increase readership by allowing the purchase of individual articles without the need for a yearly online subscription. Time will tell.
The art of a good blog is figuring out the right mix between the piece that you know is going to get maximum search-engine hits to the piece that really defines what you’re doing that’s uniquely valuable. That second piece might not bring in as much traffic, but it’s the piece that’s gonna keep the traffic once you get it in the door. So all of that, which is part of the job of building a community, building an audience — those are totally new skills.
“You lose your job, you run out of savings or a safety net, have to sell [your] home, it’s a down market and you can’t sell your house, you move, pull the kids out of school, it’s not easy to get another job and your whole lifestyle has to change.
“Then there’s homelessness, maybe spiraling alcoholism, and then living on the side of the train tracks.”
In the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg looks at True/Slant, a new Web journalism enterprise with an interesting revenue model. First, the journalism side:
It is launching with 65 journalists, or “knowledge experts,” assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These “headline grabs” link back to the originating outside site.
The initial group of contributors includes current or former writers for publications such as the Financial Times, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Time magazine and the Boston Globe.
Now about that rather unique revenue model:
True/Slant will run regular Web ads throughout. But, in a highly unusual move, the site plans to offer advertisers their own entire pages where they can run blogs and try to attract a network of followers. These will have the same design and features of the journalists’ pages, but will be labeled as ad content.
At Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit, business writer Ryan Chittum consistently posts his insightful analysis of the mainstream media’s coverage of our economic troubles.
Under the legislation, newspapers would operate as nonprofits, having 501(c)(3) status. This equates to newspapers operating for educational purposes, similar to public broadcasting. Doing so would prevent papers from making political endorsements, but they would still be allowed to openly report on all matters, including political campaigns.
If I find any buzz around the Web on this, I’ll be sure to let you know. Yep, there’s buzz:
Want to know what the top 15 newspaper websites were of 2008 in terms of traffic? Of course you do, and the fine folks at Nieman Journalism Lab are all over it, compiling the data.
The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead. There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.
