Archives: December 2009

mediabistro.com: So What Do You Do Ann Curry?

WWD: Has the Internet killed letters to the editor?

The Observer: The insurgents of New York, 50 young New Yorkers who are changing the face of the city.

Slate: A Q&A with John Maxwell Hamilton, author of Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting.

Guest of a Guest: 10 New Years resolutions for social media users.

MediaPost‘s Maryanne Conlin wrote a post today about crowdsourcing, a technique employed by corporations that costs them less than it would to hire outside consultants. By calling on a green blog/mom community to help develop a non-profit project, Conlin claims “When they get passionate about something, they can compete with the best of social media marketers by creating and executing strategies that work to advance their wants and needs.”

But is it ethical?

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In a year where most media companies measured successes not with how much they gained but with how little they lost, Meredith Corporation stood out not only for the awards they won, but for actually gaining ad pages overall, increasing total ad revenue, and integrating and expanding its Web division. Who thought that titles like Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle would totally make bank against Time Inc. and Condé Nast‘s breadwinners who all had to scale back this year?

Read the official press release after the jump.

Previously: Meredith Titles Gain More Ad Pages In December, Meredith Turnaround Wins Publisher Of the Year, Meredith, WE Launch Cross Promotion

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Now on to crowdsourcing, which is more than just asking your Twitter friends for restaurant recommendations. It can also be a helpful tool for journalism, wherein reporters cull information and data from groups of people on the ground and in the know.

Perhaps one of the best examples of crowdsourcing was The Huffington Post‘s 2008 “Off The Bus” election coverage, and this year nonprofit investigative news org ProPublica tapped that project’s mastermind, Amanda Michel to lead their own crowdsourcing efforts.

Now, ProPublica is using crowdsourcing to gather information for a number of projects, including tracking the government’s various stimulus projects around the country and keeping tabs on the national load modification program. ProPublica reporter Paul Kiel is heading the loan mod project, and he spoke to FishbowlNY about the stories that have come out of their crowdsourced questionnaire and how crowdsourcing can be used as a tool by traditional news organizations.

Kiel said ProPublica’s loan mod crowdsourcing project started soon after the program launched, around May of this year. The organization posted a short questionnaire, asking readers whether they tried to apply for loan modifications and what their experiences were. “We’ve had about 300 responses over the last few months,” he explained. “We keep tabs on it and get in touch with people from time to time. It’s led to about two dozen stories, and I’ve used people who we’ve gotten through our crowdsourcing as sources for those stories.”

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Because there is such a thing as a free lunch, as long as you promise that your meal will be featured in The New York Times: “Documenting The Decade” is the NYT’s interactive photo gallery of over a hundred pictures taken this decade, none of them by New York Times paid photographers.

Instead, the Times asked readers to submit their photos and built an interactive player so you can see when people took the most photos in the past ten years (September 11 is neck-and-neck with Obama’s Presidential win, but it’s really this year’s Hudson River crash and the Inauguration that spiked this nation’s shutterbugs).

Each photographer gets a photo credit and a little blurb about their picture, but we wonder the relative merit of just giving your pictures to a major news org so they can do a round-up without having to shell out a dime to the individuals who actually did the work for this piece. Citizen journalism in the making!

Read More: Documenting The Decade — New York Times

As we cover the media trends we’re looking forward to in 2010, today we’re focusing on citizen journalism and crowdsourcing — two similar concepts that promote engagement between reporters and people involved in the stories they’re covering.

To get us started on this topic, we spoke to Jim Gaines, the former managing editor at People, Time and Life magazines and current editor-in-chief of digital publication FLYP, about the possibilities of citizen journalism and the future of journalistic storytelling.

Gaines is a big proponent of using journalism to start a conversation, and using collaboration from readers to continue that conversation and coverage of a story. Although his own pub FLYP doesn’t have the infrastructure in place yet to accomplish his vision, Gaines thinks collaboration is the wave of the future.

“I think 2010 is going to be enormously important as a turning point for digital publishing in general, citizen journalism in particular, because the facility — and by that I don’t just mean the software and hardware, I mean the culture and other supportive elements — are just getting into place,” Gaines told us.

“Google Wave is a wonderful example of a collaboration, but there are so few people on it that it has no scale. I think that it is an interesting model for the storytelling of the future, which is not going to be a one-way story told. A story is going to be the beginning of a conversation and that story will be modified by the conversation that follows. I don’t know exactly what that model is going to look like because the experimentation is only beginning. But it’s very exciting.”

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We didn’t know anyone was actually working this week, but anyone who decided to go in to Condé Nast‘s Times Square headquarters today got a nasty surprise.

A suspicious looking van caused a bit of a bomb scare near the site of the New Year Eve ball drop today, and workers from a few buildings — including Condé Nast’s building and NASDAQ’s HQ — were reportedly asked to evacuate into the freezing cold.

New York police later gave the all clear after the van was discovered to only contain clothing, The New York Times reports.

Police Find Only Clothing in Abandoned Van –New York Times

You might say that the impact of “citizen journalism” on 2009 started with US Airways Flight 1549 crashing into the Hudson River, and the pictures of the plane hitting Twitter before any news outlets had them. And of course the role that Twitter played in helping Americans find out about protests in Iran after its election, proving that the micro-blogging tool could be used for something other than hourly updates about mundane activities. It may have peaked with MissTearah and the Fort Hood shootings, when news outlets realized that you can’t trust eyewitness accounts for your entire network of information.

But if all we had to go on was Twitter, than it would be the Year of Microblogging. Some consider bloggers to be citizen journalists because they work outside the spectrum of traditional news organizations, with all the pros and cons that it entails. Below, we take a look at what citizen journalism in 2009 might mean for the New Year.

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FishbowlNY editor Amanda Ernst visited the mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast today, joining hosts Jason Boog of GalleyCat and AgencySpy‘s Matt Van Hoven to discuss the biggest media stories of 2009.

On Amanda’s list: stories about layoffs and magazine closings, but good news of circulation revenues climbing at places like The New York Times. Also, announcements of new magazine launches, like Afar and new Web sites, including Atlantic Wire, Mediaite and HollywoodLife.

Also discussed: the biggest stories of the year covered by the media — Balloon Boy, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods among them — and how the media’s coverage has changed.

You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

NPR‘s Carl Kasell will broadcast his last “Morning Edition” this morning.

In advance of wrapping up his newscasting job, Kasell, who first anchored “Morning Edition” in 1979, talked to co-host Renee Montagne about his career and upcoming plans. Although he will be leaving the morning news show, he will continue to emcee and judge NPR’s quiz show “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” among other duties for the non-profit radio network.

“I hear the word retirement a lot concerning my current situation, and the only thing I’m retiring is my alarm clock,” Kasell said. “No longer will I hear that clock go off at 1 o’clock in the morning, or five after one, as I like to say, because I like to sleep in.”

Interesting fact: about 2,000 people have Kasell’s voice on their answering machine.

Listen: Carl Kasell: After 30 Years, A Chance To Sleep In –NPR

Previously: After 30 Years, NPR’s Kasell Retires From Newscast –FishbowlDC

(Photo by Antony Nagelmann via NPR)