Publishing 2.0

Scaling Native Advertising

How will native advertising scale? That’s the question on the mind of every brand advertiser, ad agency, and publisher. Native advertising has emerged as a great hope for the future of advertising, to capture the billions of brand ad dollars expected to shift from TV, where mass audiences are

RSS

How to Fix RSS Redux

Five years ago, I wrote a post about How to Fix RSS (which was my first post to appear at the top of Techmeme). The technology and media landscape has dramatically changed since then, so I’ve updated the simple three-step program, with a particular focus on news organizations. RSS

Publishing 2.0

Publish2 Update: Network Growth and New Business Model

From the Publish2 Blog: Many people have reached out to us recently and asked, “How’s Publish2 doing? You guys have been very quiet for the last few months.” That’s because we’ve had our heads down rolling out the full content distribution service that we announced last summer

Syndication

Disrupting the Traditional News Syndication Model

Originally published on Nieman Journalism Lab Clay Shirky predicts that in 2011 traditional news syndication will see widespread disruption. I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t think the disruption will happen the way Clay describes it. Clay’s prediction assumes that news consumption will continue its shift from

Content Distribution

The Content Graph and the Future of Brands

Yesterday, two stories from Aol’s DailyFinance appeared in the Sunday print edition of the Daily Telegram, a newspaper in southern Michigan. These stories appeared on a business page that would otherwise have been produced almost entirely with stories from the Associated Press. The Daily Telegram got permission to publish

Collaboration

The New Associated Press for the 21st Century

This week, at TechCrunch Disrupt, we’re announcing the launch of Publish2 News Exchange, a platform aimed at disrupting the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers. With Publish2 News Exchange, newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity

Ad Networks

High-End Brand Publishers Need to Sell Scalable Premium Ad Solutions, Not Commodity Ad Space

Newspaper online advertising has not benefited greatly from the recent upswing in online ad spending, according to the New York Times and most of the recent newspaper company quarterly results. This is no surprise because most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds — and thus are

Aggregation

Content Doesn't Matter Without the Package

In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — which may

Distribution Channels

What Google Understands About the Future of News and Publishing That Publishers Do Not

Google knows a lot about the future of news — more than many publishers. It’s evident in Google’s new product, Fast Flip, which allows news consumers to “flip” through news stories. What’s striking about Fast Flip is that Google is innovating precisely where publishers used to lead innovation.

Journalists

Journalists Are News Companies' Most Valuable Asset

Journalists are news companies’ most valuable assets. That’s what Mike Arrington asserts, and I think he’s right (disregard the “failing old media” rhetoric): And earlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to – they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by

Publishing 2.0

Best Practices for Journalists Curating the Web: New York Times Bits Blog "What We're Reading"

The New York Times technology blog, Bits, which features original online reporting by all of the NYT technology journalists, has formally launched a new feature called “What We’re Reading.” This feature (powered by Publish2) illustrates a number of important best practices for how journalists and news orgs can create

Aggregation

Why we link: A brief rundown of the reasons your news organization needs to tie the Web together

Originally posted at BeatBlogging.org, a resource for journalists using social networks, blogs, and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How

Aggregation

Retraining Wire and Feature Editors to Be Web Curators

If the wire editor and feature editor roles are becoming obsolete for print newspapers, as Steve Yelvington persuasively argues, then those editors should be retrained — or retrain themselves — as web curators. Rather than become obsolete, these editors could become essential to their news organization’s future on the web. Steve

Collaboration

Collaboration can't cure #swineflu, but it can fight filter failure

Perhaps you’ve noticed a bit of activity online the last few days related to a certain not-quite-pandemic bug that’s going around. Swine Flu. Or, to put it in microblogging terms, #swineflu. The wonderful thing about the ease of communication online is that anyone can start a discussion, carry

Publish2

Joining Publish2: Ryan Sholin, Greg Linch and Howard Weaver

Today we’re announcing three major additions to the Publish2 team — journalists whose stellar reputations speak for themselves: Ryan Sholin joins us next week as Director of News Innovation. Greg Linch is the winner of the Publish2 Future of Journalism Contest and will join us in the fall as our

Aggregation

How Google Stole Control Over Content Distribution By Stealing Links

There is so much misunderstanding flying around about the economics of content on the web and the role of Google in the web’s content economy that it’s making my head hurt. So let’s see if we can straighten things out. Google isn’t stealing content from newspapers

Newspapers

The Great Seattle Advertising Experiment: What Will Happen to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Print Advertising Dollars?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer today because the first major metro newspaper to stop publishing in print but keep the news brand alive on the web. Seattlepi.com’s Executive Editor Michelle Nicolosi promises bold experiments, “to break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to.” And to be sure,

Citizen Journalism

Announcing Digital Sunlight: Publish2's Platform for Collaborative Journalism

Today, with the signing of the largest government stimulus program in history, Publish2 is announcing a new initiative to help newsrooms faced with declining resources continue to play the watchdog role that is so vital in this time of crisis. Digital Sunlight is our code name for a new feature

Aggregation

Why local-news aggregation is useful information, not information overload

My post on the Washington state linking project focused on the awesome innovation involved and on the benefits of collaborative linking in general. But the project also shows why this kind of news aggregation is so useful for a local audience. The biggest danger with news aggregation is that instead

Aggregation

Networked link journalism: A revolution quietly begins in Washington state

The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be. Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

Media Economics

The Problem of Media Economics: Value Equations Have Radically Changed

Entering 2009, the future of media is undoubtedly a quandary, with no end of head-scratching across the industry. As with everything these days, it seems that it all comes down to radically changing economics. There are way too many conversations about the future of media, news, journalism, etc. going on

Publishing 2.0

One Week Left To Enter The "I Am The Future Of Journalism" Contest

There’s one week left to submit an entry to the “I Am The Future Of Journalism” Contest. The deadline is December 30. We’ve gotten some great entries by journalists who are thinking creatively, passionately, and positively about the future. You can show your support for them by helping

Media Economics

When A Newspaper Stops Publishing In Print, What Happens To The Print Advertising Dollars?

With all the debate over the future of newspapers, here’s a question I haven’t heard anybody ask (much less answer): If a metropolitan newspaper suddenly ceased to publish, leaving the city with no newspaper, what would happen to all of that newspaper’s ad dollars? Most newspaper companies’

Aggregation

Breaking News Link Journalism: Blagojevich Arrest

So you’ve got a big breaking story right in your backyard, e.g. the governor gets arrested for trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the President Elect. Your newsroom is on the case, but the story is still developing. There are national ramifications, so reporting

Citizen Journalism

Crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, and the lesson of scrapbook news

I want to further explore the idea of “scrapbook news” as a way of reframing the crowdsourcing/citizen journalism discussion. One reason mainstream news organizations haven’t embraced the concepts may be that the spirit (if not the letter) of the cit-j discussion tends to focus on the people involved