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Special Reports

  • Apps: The app genie is out of the bottle. Local news organizations have moved past the stage of merely having an app and are moving on to the tricky challenge of monetizing those apps, and to do that, they will have to build on the momentum of local mobile search, unlock the power of geolocation and push for better app metrics.
  • Daily Deals: Local media companies are turning to white-label platform providers so that they can build their own brand in the marketplace and potentially make more money.

Industry Calendar

May 2012
Mo
28
Memorial Day
Holiday
June 2012
Th
Sa
7-9
Association of Alternative Newsmedia
AAN's 35th Annual Convention
Detroit, MI
We
27
BIA/Kelsey
Mobile Local Media San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
July 2012
We
4
Independence Day
Holiday
Fr
Su
27-12
Summer Olympics
Holiday

Net Essentials

Google Engineer Goes News-Free For A Month
Poynter, Mar 16, 2012, 7:28 AM EDT
Mobile News Sites Need Much Improvement
Knight Digital Media Center, Feb 22, 2012, 3:58 PM EST
Many news publishers focus their mobile strategies on platform-specific apps — but the mobile Web may actually be more important, since a mobile site is easier to discover, link to, and share from a mobile device. Link | Add comment
Commentary
Twitter And The Shrinking News Cycle
GigaOM, Feb 14, 2012, 7:42 AM EST
Mathew Ingram: "Now the news is just as likely to appear in a tweet or to be posted as a status update by someone who is directly involved in the event. In a nutshell, this means that the value of a simple 'scoop' or breaking news report is declining rapidly — and that might just be a good thing." Link | Add comment
4 Lessons For News Orgs From Apple iBooks
Nieman Journalism Lab, Jan 19, 2012, 3:51 PM EST
Apple's New York event today focused primarily on education, but according to Nieman Journalism Lab director Joshua Benton, the announcement has big implications for the news business: "Apple's investing big in a creating a new kind of reading experience for a new kind of content, and they're completely ignoring every desktop and laptop computer in the universe." Link | Add comment
AppCheck: WRAL
WRAL App Wins With Simplicity, Interactivity
NetNewsCheck, Dec 6, 2011, 6:45 AM EST
Users of WRAL-TV (Raleigh, N.C.) pioneering news app can check the news, weather and sports, as well as submit photos, video and email. They can even click to call the newsroom with tips. The station, which launched its first app with Sprint in 2004 and its first iPhone app in 2008, recently added a premium option for its popular 'Behind Bars' vertical. Key to the app's success, WRAL says, is a simple interface and lots of interactivity. Full Story | Add comment
Five Lesson From eBooks For News Orgs
Poynter, Nov 21, 2011, 7:02 AM EST
Several newspapers, news sites and magazines have experimented with eBooks in an effort to find bigger audiences and longer lives for some of their stories. From shorter production cycles to the need to add value, Poynter's Jeff Sonderman offers five lessons eBooks hold for news organizations. Link | Add comment
Web Takes News To Era Before Mass Media
Economist, Jul 8, 2011, 7:21 AM EDT
Technology is helping the news industry return to something closer to the coffee house of three hundred years ago, where news was circulated in taverns and coffee houses. The Internet is making news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan, reviving the discursive ethos of the era before mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics. Link | Add comment
Sorkin, Simon: Twitter Dumbs Down News
AllTwitter, Jun 24, 2011, 8:10 AM EDT
Writers Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and David Simon (The Wire) discussed Twitter with Piers Morgan earlier this week. Simon: "You get everything you want when you want it [from Twitter] but the lack of explanatory journalism to back it up, the lack of dialogue… the dialogue has suffered. I can find out everything faster as a headline. Life is complicated. In a Twitter feed or 24-hour TV coverage you can’t explain the complexity of a drug war. I’m worried about the high end of journalism.” Link | Add comment
Commentary
Can Google Ever Be A Neutral News Provider?
Guardian, Feb 11, 2011, 3:47 PM EST
Emily Bell: "The idea that Google will ever be a neutral player in a world where information is so highly political has always been nonsensical. Google in truth has as much a claim to being a 'stateless news organisation' as WikiLeaks, not through secrecy but through highly distributed regional power and large corporate profits." Link | Add comment
Tumblr Tag Pages Add Egypt Coverage
Nieman Journalism Lab, Feb 2, 2011, 3:47 PM EST
Microblogging site Tumblr has joined the ranks of outlets covering the Egypt uprising. The site uses its curated tag pages, a new feature the company rolled out about a month ago. The feature lets a group of Tumblr users select the choicest cuts from their feeds for public consumption. Link | Add comment
Commentary
How Twitter Is Like The Cassingle
State of the Fourth Estate, Dec 20, 2010, 2:22 PM EST
Author Dave Levy: "Content that is meant not to last isn’t a bad thing. It has a complete use, and in some instances, can become a culture in and of itself. Look at Tumblr, look at Twitter or the Facebook news feed: no one drinks from the firehose. Anyone who says they consume it all is lying. Like the pop music cassingle, a bit of this 'fast content' is designed to be devoured by those who catch it, but completely OK to be missed if it hits the trash can before noticed." Link | Add comment
Seattle Newsrooms Hit The Tweets Overnight
LostRemote, Dec 14, 2010, 3:56 PM EST
A powerful early morning thunderstorm sent KIRO news staffers and a handful of neighborhood blogs to the Twitter stream during the usually barren overnight hours. Link | Add comment
BIA/Kelsey ILM: 10
Local News Becomes Web's New Boom Town
NetNewsCheck, Dec 9, 2010, 8:10 AM EST
As local news and information become the hot topics on the Web, an increasing number of Web sites, including AOL’s Patch and local search company Fwix, are vying to become go-to sources in the local space. Full Story | Add comment
DNAinfo Gambles On Local Online News
Crain's New York Business, Dec 7, 2010, 7:14 AM EST
DNAinfo, the ambitious gamble on local online news by TD Ameritrade founder J. Joseph Ricketts, is leaving the Beta phase and Ricketts believes his site will become a viable model for local news and will expand beyond its current New York base. Link | Add comment
Commentary: TV Stations On the Web
TBD, NBC And Moving Past TV On The Web
LostRemote, Dec 3, 2010, 5:20 PM EST
Cory Bergman: "The TBD brand change illustrates a struggle in local TV today. Brands built on call letters and channel numbers may not translate well to digital platforms if you’re striving to grow a unique online experience that goes beyond an extension of TV." Link | Add comment
TBD Shelves Its Community Ad Network
BIA/Kelsey, Dec 2, 2010, 3:18 PM EST
TBD.com, the Washington, D.C., hyperlocal news site branding the online operations of Allbritton Communication’ WJLA-TV and Newschannel 8 under the TBD umbrella, is tabling its local ad network, citing limited advertiser interest. Link | Add comment
TBD Taps RAMP For Content Optimization
NetNewsCheck, Nov 22, 2010, 8:42 AM EST
TBD.com is deploying RAMP’s content optimization platform, allowing the local news site to offer comprehensive site search, automated transcription and video tagging to enable search and SEO, and local topic index pages with aggregated content from TBD.com partner station WJLA and other partner blogs. Full Story | Add comment
Yahoo Debuts Its New Hyperlocal Service
LostRemote, Nov 18, 2010, 7:00 AM EST
Yahoo this week rolled out its new Yahoo hyperlocal service in Brooklyn, San Francisco and Michigan, allowing users to read news and content on a neighborhood level. The service features aggregated content, contributor posts, events and nearby deals from more than a dozen providers like Groupon and Living Social. Link | Add comment
Hyperlocal News Sites
Philly's WHYY Launches Local News Site
NetNewsCheck, Nov 15, 2010, 3:03 PM EST
Philadelphia public broadcast station WHYY has launched a new hyperlocal news site, Newsworks. The new site represents serious competition for The Philadelphia Inquirer's philly.com and NBCPhiladelphia.com, which have been criticized for being light on serious news. Full Story | Add comment
AOL To 'Patch' Up Tampa Bay
The Daily Loaf, Nov 9, 2010, 2:33 PM EST
AOL will launch Patch in the Tampa Bay, Fla., area within the next month. AOL has so far announced sites for six neighborhoods in the area -- downtown St. Pete/Old-Northeast, Brandon, Sarasota, Bradenton, Westchase & Bloomingdale -- and has added a couple St. Petersburg Times alumni to its roster of reporters. Link | Add comment
Local Sites Team Up To Bring In Ad Revenue
Columbia Journalism Review, Nov 9, 2010, 8:15 AM EST
Communities across the country are experimenting with blog networks on a small scale, and the successful networks share a few key ingredients: money to invest up front in a full-time sales staff, loyal and local advertisers, and strict ad design standards. Link | Add comment
Hyperlocal News
TBD GM Brady Exits After Content Fight
Business Insider, Nov 8, 2010, 11:34 AM EST
Jim Brady, general manager of local-news site TBD, has left the company after an argument with publisher and owner Robert Albritton over whether the site should focus more on original reporting or aggregating content. Link | Add comment
Hyperlocal News
Oregonian Seeks Local News Partnerships
The Oregonian, Nov 8, 2010, 9:02 AM EST
A $50,000 grant from American University's Institute for Interactive Journalism is helping The Oregonian build partnerships with hyprlocal news sites that are not connected to the paper. Link | Add comment

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Opinions
Features
Ideas
  • Mobile And The Media's Imploding Biz Model

    Michael Wolff: "If the news business on the Web is depressing, contributing to the existential angst that has gripped every established news organization, mobile turns the story apocalyptic: there is no foreseeable basis on which the news establishment can support itself. There is no way even a stripped-down, aggregation-based, unpaid citizen-journalist staffed newsroom can support itself in a mobile world."

  • WashPo Ombud's Paywall Analysis Is Faulty

    Ryan Chittum: "You can't compare nine months of circulation-revenue changes to 12 months of ad-revenue changes and then say the former 'didn't even cover the decline in the latter.' That's like giving somebody a 100 meter headstart in the 400 meters and then talking about how the laggard couldn't even compete, even though they ran faster than the rest of the field."

  • The 'Sharing' Mirage

    Frédéric Filloux on the benefits and pitfalls of teaming up with content distributors: "Media should be very careful with their level of reliance on other content distributors such as Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon. This can be summed up to a simple question: can we trust them?The short answer is no."

  • Paywalls Open Doors For Local News Sites

    Howard Owens: "As a matter of business reality, when an incumbent business moves deeper into sustaining innovation it opens up opportunities for disruptors. In every market where a newspaper puts up a paywall, an opportunity is created for an entrepreneur to start a local online news business."

  • For Future Of News, Killer App Is Credibility

    Robert Hernandez, an assistant professor of professional practice in journalism at USC Annenberg: "With technology empowering everyone with the ability to create and to distribute, I predict — and wish — that in 2012 the new dominating factor will be Credibility. Actually, earned Credibility."

  • Layoffs, Cutbacks Lead To News Deserts

    Tom Stites: "Desertification is on the march, claiming more and more communities as newspapers continue to wither and few Web efforts manage to replace more than a fraction of the original reporting that newspapers have abandoned."

  • Moneyball: Fixing Newspaper Web Sales

    Mel Taylor: "Today's Newspaper industry is like that once great, but now struggling baseball team playing on a new, hyper-competitive field called the Internet. The veteran print team is stuck in a rut using the same, tired strategy that did serve them well for years, but no longer. Today, they get trounced by those with more money and muscle."

  • The Metric For Missed Expectations

    Matthew Shanahan: "Here’s the problem: [Click-through rates don't] take into account audience engagement, not to mention the fact that other advertisers are competing for the click-through on the same page."

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