We’ve been expecting this so long it seems anticlimactic, even overdue.
The Christian Science Monitor announced today it will end its daily print edition and publish only on the Web, except for a new weekend print magazine. The 100-year-old newspaper claimed in a press release it will be the first national daily to substitute its Web site for its print edition when the change kicks in next April.
That may seem true now, but six months is a long time for an industry where circulation and revenue are in freefall. It would be surprising if more newspapers didn’t go Web-only by April.
CSM Magazine prototype
It’s a tough switcheroo to pull, as the Monitor’s finances demonstrate. Most of its revenue comes from the paper’s $219 annual subscription fee. It hopes to make up some of that lost money by recruiting subscribers to a new $89-a-year print magazine and –this is the big surprise — by recruiting Web readers to pay an undetermined subscription fee to receive a new digital version of the daily Monitor.
That is a gambit worth watching, for sure. But there is so much news available on the Web for free –at least for now –that almost any attempt to charge for a Web-based general news service seems doomed.
Read more…
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newspapers, The Business
Apparently, somebody erroneously posted that Steve Jobs had a heart attack:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist
Uncategorized
(As reported online by David DeBolt at the Chronicle of Higher Education)
According to Michigan State’s student newspaper, The State News, the university now lets prospective students finish their applications by creating personal videos in addition to their written statements. Applicants can upload their videos to public Web sites like YouTube and then send the clips to CollegeSupplement, a site that forwards videos to university admissions offices.
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 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web |
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for inventing the World Wide Web (now known as just www.whatever), gave the keynote at the Knight Foundations’s Newseum shindig tonight for all its trustees and for its grantees from the Washington area (which included the Merrill College, of course).
But the real news? That Berners-Lee is starting something called the World Wide Web Foundation and Knight just gave him $5 million to get it going.
What is the Foundation? It’s Berners-Lee and others trying to again bring “humanity to humanity”–his initiative to start a platform for people, especially from developing and emerging countries, to figure out how information services can improve their lives.
Information matters to everyone, and Berners-Lee–and Knight–want to help people make connections. As Sarah Corbett has reported in the NY Times magazine: “as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing.” And Al Hammond, the author of an economic study on how poor people in developing countries spend their money, notes: “It’s really quite striking. What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.” 
If you build a platform, Berners-Lee has found, people find all kinds of innovative ways to stand on it. What’s to come? He doesn’t know…but he wants to tap into students and other young people and have them help him figure out what should be next.
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“We needed to break down the silos.” Sound familiar? “We’re all going to get there together or we’re not going to there at all.” From which university are these comments originating? Answer: The panelists at this session (titled “Setting Up A Multimedia Newsroom”) are from the LA Times. It was the most recent opportunity for me to confirm that the challenges/tensions in the field are remarkably similar to the same challenges/tensions I have experienced in academe during the past few years.
For my own saneness, the point is (recalling Leslie’s point at the retreat that our College is somewhere in the “middle” of the pack) not to perseverate on the notion that we’re “behind.” Perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that some of the largest news organizations – and many if not most of the smaller ones – are at approximately the same point that the academic community is in redefining our multimedia mission. One “take home” message that I learned from this ONA session is that ONE converging assignment desk in a newsroom can be shared by several teams who pump content on the Web, on the air and to the pressroom. For example, the Times’ owned TV station (KTLA) is now setting up an assignment desk in the paper’s newsroom. Perhaps we should – in time – be thinking of additional ways that our print, web, radio and television students can collaborate to search for, consider, discuss and decide which stories to cover and how to cover them.
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One of the sillier mapping sites I’ve seen lately is PaperCuts, which attempts to map where newspaper layoffs are taking place. Trouble is, the map is hard to navigate and the contextual info around it is presented in a chaotic design.
Contrast that with the cleanly designed electoral college map at RealClearPolitics. It uses personalization effectively. You can redraw the map–and tally how many votes McCain and Obama would get–based on polling results in various states. Nicely done.
RealClearPolitics has a map that allows users to simulate Electoral College vote scenarios by state and polling results.
Interactivity, Locative media, Personalization, Uncategorized
Interactivity, location, mapping, mashups, Personalization
Welcome to the merry band of bloggers at Merrill College. We share an interest in digital journalism and the many new ways people are blending media formats and technologies to tell stories.
We’ll use this space to talk about both the sublime and the ridiculous sides of media innovation. (What a fine line separates those two!) With the enormity of change rippling through media and journalism, we’ll have no shortage of things to talk about here.
A group blog, Merrill on Multimedia will reflect the diverse interests and thinking of various participants who teach, research, follow, analyze and practice multimedia journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
–Leslie Walker
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