Steve Myers
May 10, 2012
5:39 pm
Mashable
Lauren Indvik reports that people at The Atlantic's websites have
stopped thinking about SEO so they can focus on getting stories to take off on social networks. "Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company, tells her.
Now that Google displays relevant results shared by users' friends, social is becoming more important even among people who are searching. "Social media is becoming an engine that drives more than just Facebook and Twitter’s own referrals," wrote Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, declaring, "Say goodbye to SEO."
Here's more on what Havens told Indvik at last weekend's Mashable Connect conference:
(more...)
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Steve Myers
May 10, 2012
3:22 pm
Margaret Low Smith, NPR's senior VP for news, told staff on Tuesday that
Susanne Reber, deputy managing editor of investigations, is leaving NPR. The memo doesn't say where she is headed. After praising Reber's work, Smith writes, "We remain fully committed to investigative reporting at NPR."
The memo:
From: Margaret Low Smith
Sent: 08 May 2012 12:44
To: News-All Staff
Subject: A departure
Dear All,
I want to let you know about a departure. Susanne Reber, our Deputy Managing Editor of Investigations, is leaving NPR this week. In a little more than two years she built a first class team, led the coverage of many important stories and established strong collaborations with other non-profit news organizations including ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity and Frontline. (more...)
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Steve Myers
May 10, 2012
3:05 pm
Time | Forbes | Slate
Judging by the discussion about Time's cover photo of a 3-year-old boy breastfeeding, you'd think that was the subject of the cover story. Well, sort of. The cover story is actually
about Dr. William Sears and the attachment parenting movement, but you have to be a subscriber to read it. If for some reason you don't subscribe, there is little to detract you from
focusing on what they want to focus on: the
cover photo.
As Jeff Bercovici notes, Time was ready for the controversy: The magazine published a
Q&A with the mom depicted on the cover,
a story and slide show about the photo shoot, and a story about how
common extended-breastfeeding is. Time magazine
editor Rick Stengel tells Bercovici, "the whole point of a magazine cover is to get your attention."
Mission accomplished,
writes Slate's Hanna Rosin:
The image is the natural next step in the hot naked-mama photos that have become an obligatory part of a celebrity career path, (Claudia Schiffer, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson) and makes Angelina Jolie, who allowed herself to be photographed breast-feeding a mere infant, look like a wimp.
Related: Jim Romenesko points out that his former colleague at Milwaukee Magazine
wrote about extended breastfeeding in 2006 (Salon)
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May 10, 2012
8:50 am
Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal is more prolific than you’ll ever be
“In the intensely competitive world of financial blogging, dominated by young men who work long hours and comment on every new development, Weisenthal stands apart by starting earlier, writing more, publishing faster.
“During the course of an average 16-hour day, Weisenthal writes 15 posts, ranging from charts with a few lines of explanatory text to several hundred words of closely reasoned analysis. He manages nearly a dozen reporters, demanding and redirecting story ideas. He fiddles incessantly with the look and contents of the site. And all the while he holds a running conversation with the roughly 19,000 people who follow his Twitter alter ego, the Stalwart. He spars, jokes, asks and answers questions, advertises his work and, in the spirit of our time, reports on his meals, his whereabouts and whatever else is on his mind….
“Some of what he writes is air and sugar. Some of it is wrong or incomplete or misleading. But he delivers jolts of sharp, original insight often enough to hold the attention of a high-powered audience that includes economists like The Times columnist Paul Krugman and Wall Street heavies like the hedge-fund manager Douglas Kass and the bond investor Jeff Gundlach.”
“
Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times Magazine
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Steve Myers
May 9, 2012
4:19 pm
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Steve Myers
May 9, 2012
12:23 pm
About 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane announced
that his assistant would start curating the Times' best long-form journalism each day, posting links to
@NYTlongreads. A couple of hours and three long-form stories later, the curation ended.
"My assistant and I had this idea that it would be a worthwhile reader service to pluck the longer, more in-depth stories and tweet them," Brisbane said in a phone interview. "It was a short and perhaps happy experiment."
As it turned out, it was a pretty good idea, and it's been on the back burner awhile in the Times newsroom. In short order, Sasha Koren, who oversees social media and community for the Times, emailed Brisbane to tell him that the newsroom had considered providing the same service, with that exact Twitter handle. Staffing issues have kept the team from acting on the idea so far, Koren told me.
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Steve Myers
May 9, 2012
11:02 am
Nieman Journalism Lab
Adrienne LaFrance reports that Ongo, the newspaper industry's attempt to provide a personalized, curated news service,
is shutting down after a year and a half. Ongo's pitch was that it would curate stories from well-known news outlets (newspapers, mostly) and present them in a highly readable, ad-free environment, viewable on computers, iPads and iPhones. Founder and CEO Alex Kazim
described the product as a "paid alternative to a wall of inconvenience." Rick Edmonds, Poynter's business analyst,
wrote that it was "clearly a product for old-school news consumers who have migrated online rather than for digital natives."
So what killed it? LaFrance writes that the service was "hurt by a confusing pricing model," with a basic subscription — which started at $6.99 a month and dropped to $1.99 — providing some, but not all, content from major news sources. She notes "that many of its news orgs have chosen to focus on building their own paywalls."
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Steve Myers
May 8, 2012
5:17 pm
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