Digital

This isn't exactly a job listing as this task is probably too daunting for one person, but last month the Federal Business Opportunities web site posted a notice showing that the White House is looking for someone or some company to archive its social media content.

Mashable! reports:

Although policies and procedures have been in place for years for preserving and archiving paper and electronic traditional documents and records, as White House (and by extension, EOP) communication extends into areas of social media, that presents new challenges in archiving things like blog postings, Twitter (Twitter) messages, YouTube (YouTube) videos and so-on. This content, plus the comments and replies associated with them (think letters to the President) all need to be archived under the Presidential Records Act.

The government has been doing its best to tackle this without outside help, and perhaps predictably, it's been going about it in the most stunningly inefficient way possible: by taking screengrabs of the sites in question.

(They're also using social network APIs, but no further details are given on which sites are being scraped using which combination of methods. The RFP says: "Currently, the Government team is capturing the data and content both programmatically (via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from social networks) and manually (through daily screen shots).")

Got a startup? Think you can do better than hitting Print Screen every day? You can respond until October 2.

So we here at MediaJobsDaily are all about helping you find jobs and keep your job. In the good old days when the economy was still robust, few companies would complain about their employees taking a moment or two to check their personal e-mail or log on to Facebook. In today's economy, unfortunately, there's less people and much more work, so digital goofing off is ill advised.

Still we know you're addicted to socializing online and we want to do everything we can to facilitate that addiction. Meet SpreadTweet, the newest application in the Twittering sphere. SpreadTweet looks like an excel sheet, but is actually a way of keeping tabs on your Twitter account all day long. The application comes in Office OSX, Office 2003 for Windows and Office 2007 for Windows, so you can match the page with your company's own excel system. Now you can look busy for the boss and still keep up with your daily tweets. Oh technology, how we love you!

It's new, it cool and whoa does it waste time. Check out the newest thing from Google Labs (but not if you’re on deadline): Google News Timeline.

PCWorld reports:

Google News Timeline is mostly a new way to look at the same material that you can find through Google News Search. The Google engineer who built it, Andy Hertzfeld, says he was inspired by Google Maps, but instead of letting people navigate through space, he wanted to let them navigate through time. So if you want to see all the news reported about HP in April of 2007, for instance, that's easy to do: you type HP into the search field and set the date for April 2007. When you get is a grid that shows stories about HP arranged in columns, one column for each week of the month.

But that's kid's stuff. In addition to searching the Google News database, you can search through content from specific blogs, magazines and newspapers. You can look only for news photos or videos. Or you can search for sports scores or information on movies and books. Want a blow-by-blow account of the year 1424? You can get it through Google's connection to Wikipedia.

Right now this section is still very much in its infancy. There is no way to cut down on your search—by state, city or even neighborhood—though there are a lot drop-down menus, search fields, date fields, fields for tweaking the display, and ways of rearranging the information by dragging around content sources. But like every Google Labs project, it is still a product in development.

The internet has big media running scared. Right now it's the wild west, where content can be syndicated at the push of a button and anyone can become a reporter (or a star). Andrew Keen, author of the international hit Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture, says this is simply not the sustainable future. Breath a sigh of relief media, your power is soon going to be returned to you in his feudalistic or fascist future.

Andrew Keen: Web 2.0 Is Fucked (The Next Web 2009) from Robin Wauters on Vimeo.

Journalists have found the power of Twitter! It only took them three years and, oh yeah, people on the site breaking stories like terrorist attacks in Mumbai and pictures of a plane that crashed into the New York City Hudson. Okay, okay, they were a little slow, but at least they found it. The question is, how do we now find them?

Well the Chicago Tribune has decided to update their masthead to include Twitter names and that's all well and good, but it's only one paper—besides if publishers are to be believed, no one is reading newspapers anyway, so it's likely we’ll never see the masthead. Then there's Muck Rack, a new Twitter page that is logging every journalists who creates a Twitter account. So, like the idea of following Tweets from journalists working for NPR, NYT, WSJ, CBS News, CNN and other news orgs, but don't have time to put them all in your personal feed? Muck Rack has just made your life 100 percent easier. Check it out!

So when it comes to online content, the best that most papers can devise right now seems to be pay for content. Okay now that they have a solution—sort of—where do they start the charging? That's where Journalism Online comes in to help.

Started by three media executives, Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery, Journalism Online is designed to help companies create and an automated system to charge for all of their content. The system would even include an "all you can read" subscription that would allow access to multiple publications.

The New York Times reports no publishers have signed on yet, but many have taken meetings to find out how the system works.

As the company envisions the system, a nonpaying reader on a magazine or newspaper site would reach a certain point and see a page asking for payment — the Journalism Online system, operating within the publication’s Web site. But a reader who wanted a subscription to multiple sites would go directly to the new company’s own site.

"The most important thing is it’s simple to use," Mr. Brill said in an interview. "Much of the barrier to charging online is the transaction friction, as opposed to the actual cost. With this system, you'd have a single password, give your credit card number just once."

He said that for the unlimited subscriptions, "we're playing with a figure of $15 a month."

The company is also looking at helping papers negotiate licensing and royalty fees for syndicated articles.

With the shuttering of all these small, local dailies, everyone is wondering where they will find their local news. Well, techies, as usual, have the answer. In the absence of local papers, you can have a hyperlocal website.

New websites are popping up every day that are offering local news for not just your state, not just your city, but potentially as close as your own block. "Sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources," reports the New York Times. "They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants."

While sites like these have been in development for years, a new urgency has taken shape in the last few months as local papers like the Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing.

Like newspapers though, these sites need to bring in revenue to sustain themselves. Thus far they have only had limited success selling advertisement. The problem is when you slice the market so small, there aren't enough viewers of a given page to make the ad revenue worth while. Some sites have taken to approaching local mom and pop stores, but this is an expensive and inefficient system for global sites to take on.

In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups. In the last several years, neighborhood blogs have sprouted across the country, providing the sites with free, ready-made content they can link to. And new tools, like advanced search techniques and cellphones with GPS capability, help the sites figure out which articles to show to which readers in which neighborhoods.

Still like every outlet from Twitter to local newspapers, the bottom line is going to be revenue. If these sites cannot create a functional business model, they are going to be in the same situation as the newspapers they are hoping to replace.

Want to know what it takes to survive online today? Quantity, quantity, quantity. At least that's what Forbes believes. In an Folio article about their new blackberry application, Dylan Stableford reported last week that Forbes produces 5,000 articles a day. Being the exacting journalist that he is, one week later he returned to Forbes to ask them the question that has been on all of our minds: 5,000 articles a day?! Really?

Their first response, "This is the combination of staff-written, freelance contributed and partner supplied (from Oxford Analytica to newswires)." Then he asked them to clarify. The break down is below:

We do not break this out, but according to Editor Paul Maidment, the site publishes content 24/7 by editorial staff in the U.S. and bureaus in London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai and Beijing. It includes staff-written, freelance contributed, and content supplied from numerous content partners—including consultancies like Oxford Analytica and McKinsey; business schools like Wharton, Harvard Business, etc; media companies like paidContent and Venture Beat; and wire services (including Reuters and AP) as well as specialist contributors across 10 Editorial Channels and 70-plus sections within those channels.

Considering the layoffs Forbes recently underwent, we're still suspicious of this high number. If anyone can drum up analytics to disprove this claim, please e-mail MediaJobsDaily. We're anxious to follow up on this story—if nothing else, so the Andrew Sullivan and The New Republic won't feel badly with their paltry 500 posts a week.

With the AP vowing to go after content scrapers and the New York Times considering pay walls for their content, the collective thought on new business models for media outlets is that everything will not be free.

Well in his report on "8 key trends and some foresights for the next 5 years," media futurist Gerd Leonhard, says that that is not going to be the case, exactly. While content will seem free as it does right now, a shift towards paying for your content through your Internet Service Provider (or ISP), is probably the most likely solution to this revenue dilemma. Instead of subscriptions or a pay by use basis, your Time Warner plan is going to start to come with built in packages of content (i.e. sign up with Time Warner and you'll get a free subscription to NYT online).

Collective blanket licenses that legalize and unlock legitimate access to basic content services via any digital network will emerge, and are likely to take over as the primary way of content consumption, around the world (but in Asia, first). Just like water or electricity which is readily available when moving into a new home, the basic access to content will be bundled into access to digital networks, i.e. via ISPs, operators, telecoms, portals etc. This shift is starting with music (as already done by TDC in Denmark, and Google in China), and will be quickly followed by films, TV, books and newspapers. Access may often - but in local variations - 'feel like free' to the user but will in fact generate 10s of Billions of $$ via blanket licensing fees...

I think that governments around the world will call for and / or support the implementation of collective content licenses that will finally legalize content usage on the Internet, similar to how governments pushed for the radio and broadcasting licenses approx. 100 years ago. Whether these blanket licenses will be voluntary or compulsory remains to be seen - in any case the only alternative is to perpetuate a severely dysfunctional telemedia ecosystem that criminalizes almost all users and stifles innovation while generating virtually zero new revenues for the creators.

Wow, could someone get this guy a mainline to Arthur Sulzberger ASAP? For more predictions about where the future is going with digital media, check out Leonhard's full report here.

No one can say that journalists do not look out for one another. The recession is impacting everyone in the media community. In an effort to help with all of the layoffs in print publishing the Online News Association has created a free membership program.

For the past months journalists in every field have been asked to contribute $75 so that recently unemployed media professionals could receive free membership to the ONA. The ONA helps retrain traditional journalists, preparing them for the new digital world they now need to enter. In addition the association offers local events as well as discounts on journalism conferences around the United States and discounts on memberships to other guilds.

Applications for free membership can be downloaded here. Acceptance is on a first come first serve basis. So get out there and sign up today.