The Internet Archive announced this week that it received a $1 million donation from the Knight Foundation to expand it’s TV News Search and Borrow archive of television news clips. As of now, the archive has just over 400,000 clips that the public can access, link to, or borrow a hard copy for a fee.

“We want to make all knowedge available to everyone, forever, and for free. So it’s am ambituous mission,” laughs Roger Macdonald, the archive’s television news project director. 

And it all comes down to closed captioning.

The San Francisco based non-profit records broadcasts, and teases out the news using closed captioning tags and other meta-data. Twenty-four hours after the first airing, the clip is available in the archive. It’s an invaluable resource for journalists, researchers, and documentarians to study what was said, when, where, and in what context. Want to play John Stewart? Go ahead and search clips of ‘Benghazi’ on Fox last week. It can also be used for more noble causes, like tracking political speech. Read more

Do you have the New York Times Best Seller list memorized? Do you have a passion for books and want to get into the publishing business?

In this episode of “Score That Job,” career expert, author and mediabistro editor Vicki Salemi sat down with Andrea Weinzimer of Hachette Book Group to get the inside dirt on what they’re looking for in a candidate.

Here a few tips — know the industry and know which authors they publish (hint: rhymes with James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, David Sedaris…). Or just watch the video.

You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

In Toronto, citizens are wrestling with a difficult scenario: wily, unstable mayor Rob Ford is now implicated in a video that allegedly shows him smoking crack cocaine. But, the video is in possession of a group of Somali men who are involved in the very trade that supplied the crack to Ford, and they’re looking to sell it for six figures.

Determined to gain possession of the tape, Gawker editor John Cook (who flew to Toronto and saw the tape personally) has appealed to the wider audience of the website and asked that those interested in breaking the story with Gawker donate towards a $200,000 fundraising goal to purchase the tape and post it online for everyone. The Indiegogo fundraiser, the pun-laden “Rob Ford Crackstarter,” already has more than $86,000 a week before the goal deadline and includes a $10,000 tier that offers the phone that recorded the video in the first place.

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I have long been fascinated by The Voice of San Diego, a membership-based investigative news site in Southern California. Their model is one from which many news organizations can learn — they were doing memberships long before paywalls were cool, they understand the importance of covering specific niches in a community, they have a strong focus on watchdog investigations, and they’ve always made reader engagement core to their journalism. Today, the organization has relaunched its website with new software that uses technology to help amplify those goals. They realized that their old CMS was holding them back, and relaunched a spiffy new design in a move from which the rest of us in the new industry could surely learn (but I’m biased).

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Next week, the musical world will experience a huge event: eight years after their last album, master of dance music Daft Punk will drop their much-hyped album, Random Access Memories. Music website Pitchfork has honored that with an amazing, immersive feature that evokes the immersive nature of the buzzy New York Times piece, “Snowfall.”

Offering a rare glimpse into the largely private world of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and it achieves it best with strong visual elements that only new media can provide. Taking advantage of HTML5 and GIFs, the layout of the piece flows smartly and shows a lot more editorial flair than the standard feature.

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