The Future of News

I’m just going to skip right over yesterday’s tweets, live blogs, streaming videos and Flickr channels of Facebook’s location feature. I opened the filter a bit wider to let in a wider variety of sources, but Mashable and PBS/Knight/IdeaLab/MediaShift still go the most headlines through the filter.

And speaking of filters …

Google Releases Universal Search for Gmail, Docs and Sites I won’t be happy until it can find my keys and documentation of my that December 2003 expense report that accounting still hasn’t pushed through.

The future of UI Is VUI the new GUI?

Verizon Plans to Bring Live TV Streaming to the iPad The future of news is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

FINDING THE MEDIATED CITY Durn, there’s a lot of words in this post. But whatever a mediated city is, I think journalists need to be at the center of creating it.

Auto-Tweeting Your Way to Spamsville Yup. Twitter’s about conversation. Not something you automate.

Broadcast Viewer Average Age: 51 Is it the device or the content that young folks don’t like?

The Web is not dead, but many wish it so
Too many words for me to sound them all out, but Steve Yelvington looks like he might have smart thoughts about the inflammatory Wired article.

It’s still about the journalism, not the CMS I will be so glad when people feel like they no longer have to build their own CMS. Can’t everyone just use Drupal, the most awesomest CMS that is way better than anything else and is used by all the cool kids? The partisanship just has to stop.

The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners Quickly saw a line that I might turn into a t-shirt for class. “Google before you ask.”

Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 2 I’m generally skeptical of anything in a box. They are usually operated with a turnkey and are bought at a one-stop-shop. But Statline’s good people. And the Good Lord knows we need more transparency at the state level.

Gannett Goes Hyperlocal With HighSchoolSports.net Wanna oust your local incumbent news organization? Publish a database of local crime, gossip about the schools and the scores and video from high school sports.

A fresh look at reporting skills Looks like Mindy McAdams has a good conversation going over at her blog. Need to stop in and check it out.

And finally a handful of posts that always draw my attention — ones that start with a number or an interrogative:

5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

5 Questions with John Byrne of BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Now, C-Change Media

10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience

NPR Listening By The Numbers—And The Platform

How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Pay Walls

One Pager Tip Sheet: Search Engine Optimization (PDF)

Lecture Slides

Being a dude and being a child of the ’80s requires me to go see the new Indiana Jones movie this weekend. I live  in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region of North Carolina, one of the fastest growing regions in the country, and I wanted to find movie times.

Fifteen years ago I would have gone to the Chapel Hill News, the Durham Herald Sun, the Daily Tar Heel student paper, the Raleigh News & Observer, The Independent Weekly or The Spectator to get the times. Since movie times are commodity news, the paper I would have chosen would have been the one I found first — either at the bottom of my driveway or in a drop box on campus.

But here’s how I did it today:

1. I searched for “southpoint durham movie times” on Google.
2. My search returned 21,000 results, with 10 on the first page. Of those 10 choices, only one was to a newspaper site. I had six other choices before it.

What publisher of 165,000 daily circulation newspaper would have said, “It’s OK if every single one of our customers will walk by six other drop boxes before getting to ours”?

OK. The past is past. What should you do about it now?

1. If you don’t have software that lets you easily see usage stats for your site, now is the time to get some. Many are free. Google Analytics is just one of many solutions. For the moneybags among you, Omniture is a popular (and I think good) choice.
2. Look at your site usage statistics and determine at what percentage of referrers come from Google. See whether there are differences in behavior for different types of content on your site.
3. Start getting serious about search engine optimization. And by “serious,” I mean this: Are you dedicating the same (or more) resources to search engine optimization and social network marketing as you are to your print circulation department? Until you are, you’re just hoping this Internet fad will soon pass.