I’ve been reading…

These are my links for September 21st through September 28th:

• Jonathan Stray » Designing journalism to be used – “News can no longer be (only) about the mass update. Stories need to be targeted to those who might be able to improve the situation. And journalism’s products — which are more than its stories — must be designed to facilitate this.”
• MSN Spaces Closing, becomes WP.com — Matt Mullenweg – Windows Live (formerly MSN) Spaces is shutting down and migrating their 30m+ users to WordPress.com. Four years ago I was fairly worried as every internet giant (Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Google) had a hosted blogging service. Now only Blogger remains, and is firmly in our sights.
• Social Media Metrics – “The social media metric that I think does matter and that is difficult to fully qualify is sentiment: the positive or negative mentions of a brand, product, service, whatever.”
• Georgie Anne Geyer: The cyber future of reporting, delivering, packaging news – news-herald.com – “When the term “citizen-journalist” was being batted around the conversation — average citizens, anywhere, using their phone cameras to send in photos and comments — this lady was miffed. “I object to citizen-journalist,” she said in sardonic tones. “I surely wouldn’t want to be operated on by a citizen-doctor. And I doubt that people are more connected in this way — probably they are less so.”” YAWN
• Nick Davies: Data, crowdsourcing and the ‘immeasurable confusion’ around Julian Assange | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – Investigative journalist Nick Davies chipped in with his thoughts on crowdsourcing data analysis by news organisations at this week’s Frontline Club event. (You can listen to a podcast featuring the panellists
• @WebJournalist Robert Hernandez: Geolocation Is Going To Grow | Neon Tommy – “Geolocation is definitely going to grow. Foursquare is the biggest one besides Facebook Places and they’re just over a million users. Twitter is 100 million. But Facebook is 500 million. There’s a lot of folks competeing for that. “
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• How can hyperlocals and the mainstream media work better together? « Sarah Hartley – Sarah crowdsources for areas of interest for a presentation to local sites and bloggers. It raises some interesting comments.
• The Newsonomics of Apple’s “digital circulation” share » Nieman Journalism Lab – “Those 40 percent (of total U.S. music sales) and 28 percent (Apple’s share of overall music sales) numbers are ones to note. If they held true for news reading, then by 2017, we can be assured of one thing: Apple’s share of news “circulation” revenue would be mind-bending.”
• Which is better for video: iPhone 4 or Flip Ultra HD? – “… the final verdict for mojos? The Flip does take better video. But without a truly mobile way to edit and transmit the video back to the office, the iPhone is by far the better choice.”
• Mediating Conflict: BBC’s cricket correspondent hits blog comments for six – “There seems to be something of a backlash against the value of comments on blogs at the BBC. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that existing reservations about comments on blogs are beginning to surface.”
• What impact is SEO having on journalists? Reports from the field » Nieman Journalism Lab – Metrics can be good for journalism and for journalists; it just takes putting aside the fear of the now to think about future strategies for building good content that will keep readers coming back. As I’ve said before, good content and high readership levels are not mutually exclusive: good stories will be found, and SEO can help.
• Online Vs. Print: Reloaded – In Germany “Print works, online is still not recognized as a separate medium or journalistic context.”
• What’s in a journalism job ad? Analysing the skills required by employers | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – What requirements and skills are employers stipulating and which are the most popular? Laure Oliver turns to Wordle for a quick answer.