Nieman Journalism Lab - Latest Comments

Re: Revenge of the afternoon newspaper: Brazil’s O Globo sees engagement skyrocket with a magazine-like iPad app

Javier Vázquez — Wed, 16 May 2012 03:49:03 -0000

What's the actual conclusion of this story? Reads like a PR thing to me and I don't see any innovation in O Globo's app. Does it make sense to duplicate a concept (The Daily) that doesn't seem to pay off? Did engagement change over time? What's the number of readers of the print edition compared to the tablet edition?

Re: How to peek through Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles, the B.S. detection software, right now

Bhipsman — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:26:53 -0000

I would LOVE to give this to our senior journalism ethics students! Keep in touch...Barb Hipsman in Kent, Ohio

Re: Chen Guangcheng has a posse and Ai Weiwei is everywhere: Memes as dissent in China

Meilingc — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:56:50 -0000

mimetic revolution! Fight on!

Re: How to peek through Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles, the B.S. detection software, right now

Mark Newton — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:53:23 -0000

Im glad I read this article. I took the thesis survey, and I hope he ends up turning this idea into something practical in the real world. I would so love to have this as a browser addon or even independent third party software.

Edit: Funny thing... this comment as been written on my computer for the last 3 or 4 hours but it took me this long to finally post the comment. Im too easily distracted by other news...

Re: How to peek through Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles, the B.S. detection software, right now

Lance Outerbridge — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:08:36 -0000

In my mind,
any statistical claim made in a political area is suspect as well as any quote
of one politician by another. Anything that’s too good to be true isn't.

Re: How to peek through Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles, the B.S. detection software, right now

Daniel Schultz — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:37:36 -0000

For the prototype only one source (PolitiFact) is being used. Down the line more will be added (the criteria for inclusion is simple: the source needs to explain why they reached their verdicts and needs to aspire to being non-partisan). Of course the ultimate resource for verification is, and always will be, your brain :)

Re: How to peek through Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles, the B.S. detection software, right now

laimelady — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:21:00 -0000

So will this actually make PolitiFact FACTCHECK? And what resources are utilized for verification.

Re: Revenge of the afternoon newspaper: Brazil’s O Globo sees engagement skyrocket with a magazine-like iPad app

Uelij — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:25:27 -0000

It would still be interesting to see some numbers.. How many iPads are there in Brazil? And how many downloads does O Globo have per day? What about ads?

Re: Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills

Guest — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:07:56 -0000

great

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

Bwalker — Sat, 12 May 2012 21:01:37 -0000

My whole day was ruined after reading this badly written piece this morning. Ben Huh is an amazing entrepreneur - he's like Amazon+Walmart+the Catholic Church. He totally deserves to be celebrated. In the Business Press - not here. When you make 30 Million dollars not paying people for their contributions (because as he says above - that wouldn't be fun) you can't say you are the future of journalism. He says the best journalists work part time! Walmart say's the same about it's workers. I truly don't begrudge Ben Huh his bank account but it is deplorable of him to pretend that he is on the side of progress. As Alan Rusbridger is fond of repeating: the phone hacking story took three years to do and it was super expensive. Tell Nick Davies he should work "part time" or "for street cred." Really, the Nieman lab should know better - there were many many incredible people at ROFLcon and you gave this guy a blow job!

Re: Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills

Richard Bonilla — Sat, 12 May 2012 11:34:44 -0000

a good read...thank you Justin...

Re: Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills

Chris Conder — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:23:11 -0000

Agree!

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

BJ Gallagher — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:10:37 -0000

Great interview, thanks. I shared it with a few author friends and a couple book publishers, too, because I think Huh's insights have implications for book publishing, too. Thanks for a thought-provoking interview! BJ Gallagher

Re: Ongo, an attempt at a pan-media paywalled aggregator, is closing

Don Daszkowski — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:39:59 -0000

Adrienne... Did they blow through the $8M-$12M dollars? I can't imagine they did and if they didn't why not pivot?

Re: Nikki Usher: “Who Needs Newspapers?” It’s fewer people than publishers seem to believe

briansteffens — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:33:52 -0000

Having lived and worked in Manhattan, and worked closely with journalists and publishers in small towns across America, I find it troublesome how ill informed each is about the other. The misperceptions and stereotypes do nothing for discourse that might move us forward.

This post attempts to deconstruct a narrative about small town newspapers ... "my concern is that newsrooms are falsely holding on to the belief that their community members will continue to see them as their most important source of information."

Well, in fact, in many or most of the communities served by about 8,000 weekly newspapers in America (and another several hundred small dailies), the newspaper IS not only the most important source of information, it is the ONLY source. Television doesn't cover most of those towns except when the courthouse burns down or once a decade when the high school team makes the state playoffs. Radio is syndicated content from one of the coasts (or NPR or farm reports). When the young bloggers graduate high school, they're off to college or the large city for a job. Which brings us to ...

"Local news, and in particular local news online, is not something people care about as much as local journalists might hope.

"As my colleague Matt Hindman found using comScore data: Local news gets less than half of one percent of all pageviews in a local market. Hindman finds that local news sites attracted 8.3 to 17 pageviews per person per month. People spend about nine minutes a month with local news, he found."

Um, really? Because citizens in small towns aren't interested in local news online, we're to surmise that they aren't interested in local news? I find that a leap with no substance to back it up. Many local newspapers may be lacking advertisers or revenue, but the loss of readers is far less than the hit from a tanked economy. I'd much prefer 75% of adults in town spending 40 minutes reading each edition of my paper than 10% of the market's adults spending a few minutes reading fewer than four pages ... and so would my advertisers.

In small towns, the lack of online readership isn't an automatic negative. In certain markets it may be. But in many markets, that's just fine.

It's articles like this that attempt to paint a diverse community of 8,000+ news products as all alike ... that prompts too many of us to make false assumptions and statements.

Check out actual community newspaper readership stats from the Reynolds Journalism Institute's Center for Advanced Social Research, conducted for the National Newspaper Association six times in the past decade. Similar research was conducted for Suburban Newspaper Association (now Local Media Association). More facts, less fiction there. http://www.rjionline.org/casr-...

Then we get this: "... editors wax on about their commitment to covering the important public-service news that keep citizens coming back to the newspaper. More bad news: This isn’t why people are reading newspapers."Political scientists and communication scholars have long bemoaned the extent to which people don’t care about civic affairs."

Says who? Have you ever sat in a small town coffee shop or diner at breakfast and listened to the conversation at the counter or nearby tables? Or at Rotary or Kiwanis? They may not care too much about national politics (but you'd be surprised), but they sure do have an opinion and follow local politics, zoning, development, eminent domain dramas and much more. Local politics DO directly affect them, and they follow it. And the paper is the only entity serving that need.

Finally, it's suggested we disregard this snapshot of 50 papers. That's why I'd suggest you visit the national research. But note this, the average circulation of weeklies is about 5,000 circulation, and you'll find that the local publishers have a better "feel" for and connection to that community than most any online news operation. The average circulation for dailies is about 15,000. So when writing from NYC, LA, Chicago or Dallas, take a little more time to learn about who and where you're writing about when getting outside the metro city limits. That's all the WhoNeedsNewspapers duo were trying to do.

Re: Ongo, an attempt at a pan-media paywalled aggregator, is closing

Vytautas Kerbelis — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:57:01 -0000

As long as internet is free you can say good bye to all ad revenue generated by all audio and visual medium a new culture is brewing in the future with live story telling cover in digital universe.

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

David Day — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:22:21 -0000

"old men sort of frantically saying “apps! apps!” to one another." lmfao

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

Claudybl — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:30:03 -0000

Huh. Perfect social media surname.

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

Campbell — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:23:12 -0000

Another typo: "He kind of went of the rails a little bit,"

Re: Nikki Usher: “Who Needs Newspapers?” It’s fewer people than publishers seem to believe

Matthias Revers — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:26:13 -0000

To measure whether readers "care" about local news according to clicks on stories, i.e. how much they read local news, is inadequate. The right question to ask is: Do people want to have organization(s) in place that create accountability among their elected officials on a daily basis, even if they don't follow this process on a daily basis? Also, there is a difference between settled times and unsettled times, i.e. when important decisions or even normative questions are at stake, and local communities sure want to know what is going on in latter periods.. So in that sense they are right in assuming that what they do is important (the question HOW they do this is yet a different one), even if it is in part self-adulation.

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

Joshua Benton — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:38:00 -0000

Fixed — thanks.

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

Federica Cocco — Wed, 09 May 2012 06:13:54 -0000

I'm surprised no one else has commented yet. I like what Ben Huh's done with The Daily What and I'm quite excited by this new venture, though I think he's jinxing it by building a hype and making lofty speeches about re-inventing journalism, before the site has even launched.

Re: Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive

Federica Cocco — Wed, 09 May 2012 06:10:39 -0000

You've got a typo there: "Libya had it’s own standard of credibility"

Re: The Guardian: Yep, it was “major changes” by Facebook that caused drop in social reader traffic

Jono — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:23:57 -0000

They are all grouped together on a feed of trending articles now.

Re: Chen Guangcheng has a posse and Ai Weiwei is everywhere: Memes as dissent in China

Brett Lamb — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:51:12 -0000

This post is fascinating. Almost as much so as Chan's story of escape and his courage standing up to the Chinese Government. Here's my own related post. http://coffeefueledphilosophy....