May 22
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.
Tags: advertising, CNN, internet-broadcasting, journalism, msnbc, news, Video, yahoo
Jun 02
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!
Tags: journalism, savannah, ugc, web2.0
May 22
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.
Tags: awards, journalism, new, Sports
May 10
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.
Tags: CNN, journalism, ugc, Video, Web, work
May 08
Macworld sits down with Apple’s Sr. Director of Pro Apps Marketing to dispel rumours which were rampant last week that the development of Apple’s flagship pro-image workflow application had fired or reassigned it’s entire staff.
“The reports of Apple reducing their commitment to Aperture are totally false,” Kirk Paulsen, Apple’s Senior Director Pro Applications Marketing, told Macworld. “In fact, we’ve got more people working on Aperture right now than ever before. (Macworld)
Think Secret had reported that the team had been axed after extensive criticism of the first version of the application, but Paulsen says this is not the case at all. Daring Fireball heard from his sources at Apple, the departures were an ugly bit of mismanagement of the original team - and all had left of their own volition. This quote sums up the situation:
Aperture’s current engineering team was assembled before the original team left. Aperture was never without an engineering team, and the product’s future was never in jeopardy. (Daring Fireball)
Tags: journalism, Mac, macintosh, Photography
May 03
It’s been almost ten years since I picked up a camera to earn a living on a daily basis, back when I was in Savannah, Georgia as a staff photographer for The Savannah Morning News and Evening Press. I was recently doing some housecleaning and found an old Kodak PhotoCD I’d created from my best chromes and black-and-white negatives when I was job hunting in 1994. I posted the collection of images on Flickr, seen in the photo gallery here. I was trying to be so bleeding edge - I remember sending out portfolios on a floppy disk (yeah, a 1.4 dual-sided deal) and I put together a slick one-page dye-sub print from this collection of images using all the gusto our office Mac IIcx could muster. Meanwhile, we shot all our color images on Fujichrome 100 or 400 - talk about challenging. Later that year I took on my next job at Morris Communication’s Augusta Chronicle as photo editor, and cut way back on daily shoots - and at least had the chance to shoot color neg film! I do miss those days, chasing news on the scanner, trying to produce something compelling from otherwise mundane assignments. Today’s work has it’s own set of challenges, and thinking on my feet - but at least I’m not working nights anymore!
technorati tags: photography, photojournalism, portfolio, savannah morning news
Tags: journalism, oldschool, Photography, portfolio
Mar 16
As featured in last Friday’s New York Times (free registration required), there is a new retrospective of Diane Arbus’ spooky photography currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum after touring several other US cities. Baby-rearing blog DaddyTypes points out a centerpiece of that collection is a portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s infant son, Anderson Cooper. Yes, CNN’s own Anderson Cooper.
The portrait, shot for Harper’s Bazaar, is described in Patricia Bosworth’s Arbus biography:
“To dispel the growing myth that [Arbus] only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph…As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper’s Bazaar Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture, the infant resembles a flat white death’s head — eyes sealed shut, moth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.”
A current photo of Mr. Cooper can be found here.
Tags: CNN, Geneaology, journalism, Photography, rumours
