Steve Myers
Feb. 6, 2012
11:59 am
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Steve Myers
Jan. 30, 2012
1:02 pm
Stanford's engineering school and Columbia's journalism school will use the $30 million gift to establish the bi-coastal David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation. In a joint release, the schools say the new Institute will "recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts." Helen Gurley Brown, who edited Cosmopolitan for 31 years, donated the money on behalf of her late husband David, a movie and musical producer who attended both schools.
Each school will receive $12 million for Institute activities, part of which will be used to endow professorships -- one for the East Coast director, the other for the West Coast director. Columbia will get another $6 million to build a "highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom." The gift is the largest ever received by the J-School. Leaders in the technology and journalism industries will sit on the institute's board.
(more...)
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Jeff Sonderman
Jan. 26, 2012
7:55 am
Internet users are sending a message most media companies aren’t ready to hear: They want to share, reuse and remix your content.
To leaders of news organizations and other media, this probably means one thing: copyright violation. But with a new style … Read more
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Matt Thompson
Jan. 24, 2012
8:10 am
As 2012 gets moving, I thought I’d be the very last person to list some of the ideas that have gotten stuck in my mind from over the last year.
Last year, I wrote a list of lessons I’d learned … Read more
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Steve Myers
Jan. 20, 2012
9:41 am
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Steve Myers
Jan. 20, 2012
8:26 am
Sixteen years ago, close to midnight on Jan. 19, 1996, The New York Times flipped the switch on its full website. The exact date has been unclear:
Bernard Gwertzman, then editor of The New York Times on the Web, recalled in 2001 that the site went up on Jan. 20, but the Times Co. corporate website
says it was Jan. 19.
Adding to the confusion is
a story published on Jan. 22, 1996, which stated, "The New York Times begins publishing daily on the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper's contents."
Eileen Murphy, the Times' vice president of corporate communications, tells me by email that the website went live the night of the 19th, a Friday. "That first weekend was intended as a 'soft launch,' which is why the Peter Lewis piece ran on Monday, January 22, 1996. That first Monday was when daily updates to the site began," she said. "The confusion between the 19th and 20th was probably a result of the fact that the site went online just before midnight on the 19th. We consider the official anniversary date to be January 19."
Five years after the website launched, Gwertzman and Martin Nisenholtz, then CEO New York Times Digital,
recalled the struggles and expectations of publishing on the Web those first few years.
The Pope was first. The Times published its "first real published thing" on the Web in October 1995, a feature about the Pope's visit to New York, according to Nisenholtz and Gwertzman. "It was really an exercise of the publishing system more than anything," Nisenholtz said. "And I'll never forget. The thing went up and we were very happy with it. And I got a call from the fellow who was running the [Times] company at the time, screaming at me about how it didn't have any ads in it."
They soon learned that the Web doesn't wait. (more...)
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Steve Myers
Jan. 10, 2012
2:56 pm
PressThink
Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton, who recently wrote that
the newspaper is trying to innovate too fast, explains his thinking to Jay Rosen:
I don’t mind experimentation to see what works and what does not. That’s admirable. I just think there’s a bit too little thought to the kind of innovation that is being done and for what purpose.
I had a conversation with an editor this week, who attended a story planning meeting, and the editor said that three fourths of the discussion was on what kind of videos, photo galleries, and online polls to do and almost no discussion of the story’s written focus and direction. It’s all distracting. Some of it is absolutely necessary, but I think a bit more focus on the reporting first, then come in with the add ons later. (more...)
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Jan. 9, 2012
12:35 pm
I’ve spoken with eight or 10 former top editors in the course of the last few months, some retired and others working in new jobs in media. From each I heard a version of the same regrets: looking back, they wished they’d pushed harder, focused more on the world outside newsrooms and responded more boldly to the opportunities and challenges of digital shift.
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Melanie Sill, former editor of The Sacramento Bee
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Jan. 9, 2012
11:51 am
“Discussing whether news organizations should or shouldn’t innovate is silly and pointless. Of course they do. Every industry does. The conversation needs to be about making smart choices and maintaining standards, and how to do that in a challenging business and technological environment.”
Related: The Washington Post’s Raju Narisetti says, “I actually wish it were true that we have too much innovation“
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Josh Hatch, online content manager of The Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Live
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