A byline on the front pages of the NY Times and the Washington Post - on the same day

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 June 2007 at 08:17
Tags: New York Times, Washington Post, nytimes, washingtonpost

Reporter Jo Becker has achieved a remarkable feat for an American journalist: her byline appeared on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post on the same morning.

Becker got her Times credit for her involvement in the paper’s massive report into News Corp. Her Post byline appeared for her work on a series on vice President Dick Cheney. Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp reports.

Bank Holiday catchup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2007 at 15:11
Tags: Blogs, Business 2.0, Die Welt, Outside.in, Photography, Santa Barbara News-Press, Santa Barbara Newsroom, The Register, Washington Post, hyperlocal

Best Easter-related wacky headline over the Bank Holiday perdiod goes to tech web site The Register, which graced RSS feeds with “Godless North Korean commies ate my monster rabbits“.

Other things we learned over the past four days include:

• Journalists at the Business 2.0 received their first blog bonuses. Since late last year, editor Josh Quittner has required reporters to blog at the monthly technology business magazine, but also announced that they would earn a chunck of the additional revenue generated by their blogs. The top earners in Quittner’s incentive scheme took home “several thousand” dollars. Others received less than $100 and a suggestion that it might be a good idea to change their blog’s topic.
• ACPO guidelines on the treatment of photojournalists that currently apply in London are to be extended nationwide, according to Amateur Photographer.
• Germany’s Die Welt went web-first earlier in the year. New figures show its web traffic up 40 per cent — month-on-month.
• Journalists sacked from the Santa Barbara News-Press in California have started a rival local news web site, the Santa Barbara Newsroom. Other online hacks are underwhelmed with the site’s riveting headlines like “Measure D Vote Could Impact County’s Share of Bond Money”.

Also worth reading:

• Wharton analysis of WashingtonPost.com. To the business school academics, the site’s success raises more qustions than it answers, because it generates 14.5% of total ad revenue. “Washingtonpost.com … is an enthusiastic tail on a very large dog,” they argue.

  (Update: The report also reveals that Washingtonpost.com is set to launch social networking functions later this spring. Readers will be able to set up their own pages and possibly upload their own audio and video at some point in the future.)

• Steve Outing’s look at hyperlocal news models, particularly the ideas underlying Ouside.in.

Some new ideas in online news design

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2007 at 10:58
Tags: Digg, Flickr, Newsvine, Portland Oregonian, Washington Post, design

Two design studios have over the past few days unveiled experimental projects that combine traditional news web site design with social media trends.

Oliver Reichenstein of Information Achitects Japan, who are currently working for a newspaper client on a developing a more” logical and intuitive unity between screen and paper news”, unveiled an reimagining of the Washington Post as a wiki.

It’s an impressive idea which as one blogger put it, combines the traditional and the postmodern by presenting an old-fashioned-looking print design at the top of the page with a radically interactive set of features below the fold.

Canadian internet consultants Hop Studios, meanwhile, wonder what a news sight might look like if it were “built for sharing instead of for telling?” Its design exercise, for a news site called (wait for it) Tickr, is based on the photo-sharing site Flickr. It dispenses with traditional newspaper sections in favour of tag folksonomy. It also adds commenting and blogging features, bookmarking and Digg-style voting.

In other words, it would be a bit like the well-established social news site Newsvine.

Meanwhile, the Portland Oregonian has begun a different sort of experiment with Flickr. The US paper is uploading all of its photographs onto the photo-sharing site. Discussion so far centers on whether this is a violation of the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site’s terms of service.

European farm subsidy site wins Freedom of Information award

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 March 2007 at 15:55
Tags: Awards, Computer-Assisted Reporting, Washington Post, data

Nils Mulvad, Brigitte Alfter and Jack Thurston of Farmsubsidy.org have won a Freedom of Information award from the US-based group Investigative Reporters and Editors.

The web site, run by a pan-European group of journalists and researchers, reveals the subsidies large landowners receive under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It has been one of the best examples of international cooporation among journalists as well as the potential for using various countries’ Freedom of Information legislation to obtain data, and as an example of how journalists can use searchable databases to better illustrate complex stories.

Mulvad, a Danish journalist, is one of Europe’s leading figures in computer-assisted reporting. He is one-half of the CAR consultancy Kaas & Mulvad, which grew out of the now-defunct Danish International Centre for Analytical Reporting (DICAR).

He was one of the first European journalists to probe the recipients of common agricultural policy cash by using the Danish FOI law to obtain the CAP data for his country. Journalists from other countries, including the UK, later joined forces to make similar FOI requests and establish the site, which provides CAP disclosures from across the EU into a searchable database.

The site was modeled on a similar effort in the United States, where the Environmental Working Group has maintained a searchable database of Federal farm subsidies since the Washington Post first forced their disclosure through an FOI case in 1996.