Tag Archives: journalism

A buried lede?

A colleague has pointed out that our hometown Atlanta Journal Constitution (free registration required) has a more in-depth story on Pipeline moving to a free product. Read ‘CNN’s Pipeline will Stream for Free.

In a story in today’s Wall Street Journal (free content) today that focuses on a new CNN initiative with Internet Broadcasting, a Minneapolis-based company that publishes the web sites for 70 local television stations, CNN has secured rights to use local stories from these affiliates, and will in turn provide content to them. As part of the deal, CNN is also taking a minority equity stake in the company. But an interesting tidbit can be found in the last paragraph of the article:

This summer, CNN also is planning to roll out a redesigned Web site that makes all its live and archived video content available free, shifting the subscription model to an advertising model.

And yes, my team has been working tirelessly on this effort for the last six months or more. I believe it’s a game-changer – the product formerly known as Pipeline (reviewed by PC Magazine at launch as ‘the most impressive video offering the Web has ever seen’) is moving to a free model, and when news is happening, I can’t imagine anyone not turning to this product if they don’t have direct access to a television but are online.

The article also talks at length about how much local market online advertising has grown relative to the overall interactive business, something on the order of 200% v. 70% over the last few years according to eMarketer stats cited in the story. This deal helps CNN in this area, and ideally increases traffic (and advertising rates) for both properties. By way of comparison, the article points out that IB has an audience of 13mm, versus CNN.com’s 27.9, and Yahoo and MSNBC.com’s 33.1mm.

Savannahnow2.0

savannahnow2dot0

So my old buddies in the new media department of The Savannah Morning News are going all Web 2.0 and relaunching their web presence from a very 1999-era treatment to a clearly forward-looking model incorporating user generated content (blogs, flickr-like photo products etc), a clean (if gradient-heavy) design, and other helpful features like RSS. The beta of the site is available here; the old site is here. Like most newspaper sites today, there is a level of content that requires registration – but taking a page from MySpace and AIMPages, has the added benefit of giving the user a personalized home page where you can post entries, photos, link to other sites, etc. Kudos to the editorial and technical teams for putting this well conceived next-gen newspaper site together. Now if only there were a nice gallery of all my photos I shot during my time there at the then News-Press from 1989-1994, I’d be really happy!

Eppys All Around

Editor and Publisher has released the 2006 EPpy Awards (full list here), an annual competition in some 32 categories chiefly focused on new media in the print industry, and several buddies of mine can claim a part in some of the larger awards. My old friend from his AOL Sports days Jim Brady led Washingtonpost.com to Best Overall Newspaper-Affiliated Internet Service (>1M uniques) as their executive editor and vp. Former Augusta Chronicle photographer Natalee Waters current newspaper The Roanoke Times took home the same award in the under 1-million unique visitors category (one of her audio/picture stories can be seen here). In the Best Internet News Service under 1 million category, The Naples Daily News took the honor where my old boss John Fish and his director of new media Rob Curley won that award. Last but not least my old buds at SI.com took home the award for Best Internet Sports Service over 1 million.

YouTube as News Aggregator

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C|Net.com reports on a new feature user-generated content play YouTube rolled out yesterday – the ability to recieve and post content sent directly from mobile devices. As evidenced by the role Flickr has played in events like the London 7/7 bombings, still images have flown around the web like wildfire in our mobile-happy world. Video has been more challenging, although major news outlets have carried some of these grainy clips on-air and on-line. But this new feature at YouTube suggests the next major news story may include plenty of citizen journalism video coverage if this feature gets even modest adoption.