Interesting Snippets

If you know nothing about an ongoing story, it gives you too little history. If you know a story well, it merely wastes the paper’s space and your time. It is a compromise demanded by the one-size-fits-all constraints of news’ means of production and distribution. What would be ideal, Jarvis said, is if there was a way to connect that piece to a source of background material that is constantly updated — and of course there is: it’s called linking to Wikipedia

Four years ago, its traditional-to-digital-audience metrics were at a one-to-one basis, meaning for every traditional reader there was a digital one, according to Justin Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company. Now, he says, on average, its digital audience is 25 times higher than the print audience. According to ComScore, The Atlantic got 3.6 million uniques in April 2012. On the advertising side, more than 50 percent of its revenue will come from digital

Today, most owners of mobile devices read news and features on publishers’ websites, which have often been coded to detect and adapt themselves to smaller screens; or, if they do use apps, the apps are glorified RSS readers such as Amazon Kindle, Google Reader, Flipboard, and the apps of newspapers like the Guardian, which grab editorial from the publishers’ sites. A recent Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users had paid for any of them. The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead… We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad… We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development.

By now, readers understand that the definitive “copy” of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers. (If a book isn’t read until it’s written in — as I was always told — then maybe an article is not published until it’s been commented upon.)

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I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. At first he tried to duck the question, but with some prodding he sighed and gave in: “More than 90 percent.” … This robonews tsunami, he insists, will not wash away the remaining human reporters who still collect paychecks. Instead the universe of newswriting will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.

(In Mar it was reported that) the Guardian’s (frictionless sharing) Facebook app had been downloaded eight million times since it was launched six months ago, seeing around 40,000 downloads a day…
Six months ago months ago Google provided 40 per cent of the Guardian’s traffic. The launch of the Facebook app resulted in a “seismic shift” with social exceeding search as a driver on several occasions in February

If, as essayist Paul Ford wrote, the fundamental question animating the Web is “Why wasn’t I consulted?” then Huffington Post could be fairly credited with succeeding at making a great many people feel that, in fact, they were being consulted, and better still, that HuffPost was grateful for their thoughts. A quarter million comments land in HuffPost’s assorted in-boxes every day

The ethos of the HuffPost newsroom was winning the Google search. Not the origination of the content, but the dissemination. Huffington Post, they understood, was not an enterprise whose core purpose was the creation of works of journalism—as significant or mundane as that can be. It was in the content business

Watts cited a science-fiction trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which Earth is a land of atomized steel caves, as opposed to Solaris, where all communication is virtual. On Earth, everyone whom everyone knows is known intimately, but they do not know anyone else. On Solaris, the connections are vast, but weak. It is almost too convenient to read that passage and, given the state of the news business in 2003, not think of newspapers as the equivalent of all those steel caves… The alternative to the steel caves, to the “clusters,” was the ephemeral network of Solaris. But where, in the here and now, did that network exist? How could it be harnessed? Peretti.. believed he had an answer: He called it the Bored At Work Network… How better to provide a momentary relief from the tedium than to disseminate something so engagingly simple that recipients would take a moment to forward it to friends

Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup, has developed an innovative platform that writes reported articles in eerily humanlike cadence. Their early work focused on niche markets, clients with repetitive storylines and loads of numeric data—sports stories, say, or financial reports… One high-profile client, Forbes magazine, uses the platform to create what Forbes writer Lewis Dvorkin calls “computer-generated company earnings previews.” Each day, the platform sorts through recent stock data to profile a notably performing company. Another client is The Big Ten Network, which uses Narrative Science to create automatic sports recaps based on box scores and player data.

Recently, the venerable news organization started experimenting with how to use Pinterest and created a Quotes board. Its description partially reads: “Editors are pinning memorable quotes appearing in The Wall Street Journal.” Each pin is an image of a quote from a recent WSJ story shown floating over a column of blurred out text, much like pull-quotes do in an actual story. A short description accompanies each pin, allowing the quote to stand alone. By clicking on an individual quote, readers/pinners are taken to the original story it was published in.

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