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Twitter Buys Summify, Gives Everyone a Reason to Use It
Mike Davidson on the Summify acquisition — but more importantly, on the future of news delivery in general. A great read.
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Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?
The Wired Magazine iPad app, in my opinion, is a pretty big UI and IxD win. It’s easily the best-designed magazine to come out of the App Store since the iPad’s launch, and it is, for the most part, a joy to use. But it’s built by packaging up two PNGs for each page (one landscape, one portrait), and frankly, that’s just an idiotic and incredibly inelegant way of doing it.
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Spring cleaning — 12 things the world should toss out
A pretty great list from the Washington Post.
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Charging (a lot!) for news online: The Newport Daily News’ new experiment with paid content
The Newport Daily News’ innovative new strategy to profit in this digital world? Focus all their efforts on print, of course. They’re not only charging for online content, but they’re charging a lot. Like, more than twice what their print product costs. And the online product offers no additional content, it simply duplicates the same content that has built the print newspaper to a whopping 12,000 circulation. To steal a line from my great friend Nathan Borror, this feels a lot like watching a Christopher Guest movie — only they’re not joking.
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Dear newspapers…
Dan Wineman has a great solution for newspaper companies who are struggling to survive.
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Adrian Holovaty: The definitive, two-part answer to “is data journalism?”
Word.
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Bear last seen east of I-5; wildlife agents suspend search
Seattle wildlife agents have suspended ths search for the black bear cub that’s been evading them in Seattle for the past 48 hours. That’s amusing and cute and entertaining, but what’s more amusing is a couple things about this Seattle Time article. First, they’re calling him “Urban Phantom,” which has to be the worst bear name of all time. Second, they use ALL CAPS at the end of piece to stress the importance of not looking to bear directly in the eye. ALL CAPS. Really? In a newspaper? Wow. Finally, the suggest that if you see the bear, you tell it, “Everything is fine, take it easy.” I love the mainstream media.
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The EveryBlock iPhone app
The EveryBlock iPhone app has been released, and it’s pretty damn sweet. Joseph, Wilson, and the rest of the team did a real bang-up job, here. Love it.
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EPpy Awards Finalists
Congrats to my buddies in Lawrence for being nominated in the “Best News Site” (LJWorld.com) category again this year, and especially to Nathan Borror, whose design for Lawrence.com is nominated in the “Best Design” category.
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washingtonpost.com is dead, long live The Washington Post
WaPo drops the washingtonpost.com brand in favor of the old standby, The Washington Post. In my opinion, this is the right move — one brand is better than two — but I do think their classic blackletter masthead looks a little odd atop their over-stylized navigation. Still, I’m glad to see the unifying their brand again. Several newspaper still seem to want to differentiate between their online and print products, and it’s just not smart.
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5 Sickening Habits of Mainstream Websites
> The big guys think that just because they entered in the game early, or because they have some popular print publication backing them up, they can get away with whatever they want.
It is, frankly, astonishing that any of these five habits are still tolerated by users in 2008.
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NBC goes local
NBC is rolling out local sites for cities like New York, Chicago, LA, Philly, and others. It remains to be seen whether or not they have the domain expertise to cover these cities as well as the really good local daily newspapers, and if they ever do this in smaller cities/town, but if I were that daily, I’d be taking them seriously. Pretty nice design, too.
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LJWorld.com: Race for U.S. Senate
Once again loving Nathan Borror’s information design for the election results in Lawrence, KS. It gets a little bit better every time — and it was kick ass the first time.
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Newsvine’s Mike D. interviewed
Nice short interview with Newsvine founder and close personal friend Mike Davidson. Good stuff.
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New York Times To Shutter IHT Site
Probably the right move for The Times, but it is a bit sad to see IHT, one of the most innovative journalism sites in the history of the Web, to be going away. RIP.
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The Onion: Inside Obama’s Emails
So good. From Hillary: “B, let’s take that bitch on together.” Haha. Also, I love that The Onion calls this an “Interactive Graphic.” I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a joke or not, but I find it funny.
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DjangoCon 2008 Panel: Django in Journalism
Moderated by Adrian Holovaty, panelists Matt Waite (St. Petersberg Times), Maura Chace (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Matt Croydon (Lawrence Journal-World), and Ben Welsh (Los Angeles Times) discuss Django and journalism at DjangoCon. Really good stuff here. The discussion ranges from what’s great and not-so-great about Django in a newsroom to the general decline of the newspaper industry to how to get the “pointy-haired bosses” at traditional media organizations to buy into something other than the “pageviews equals dollars” worldview that is helping to destroy serious journalism in favor of photos of Lindsey Lohan. Really good talk.
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Everymoment Now : Obama Vs. McCain
Some really great infographic work here. Don’t miss the internal pages, too.
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Las Vegas Sun Weather
Really nice design work on The Las Vegas Sun’s new weather page. And of course, I’d be remiss to not point out that it’s Ellington and Django-powered. ;)
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EveryBlock adds Seattle!
EveryBlock added Seattle to its list of cities — as well as Boston and D.C. Sweet.
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CNN launches “backstory” feature
I’m not really sure I like the Coverflow-style UI CNN.com is using for this, but I like the concept, as it solves one of my longest-standing complaints about online news. As a person who doesn’t really keep up on news day-to-day, I often jump into a story several days in (when something gets really big, instead of at the very beginning). The problem I often have is that the articles I find at that point are all about the latest developments in the story, and often assume I already know how it all started and what has happened to date. This “backstory” feature attacks that problem by providing a chronological UI to all the stories related to a particular current event. It works, but I personally would rather just see a chronological list of bullet points that catches me up without all the glitz. Still, I’m happy to see someone trying to address the problem.
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Brian Ford: How to be a Successful Journalist With No Prior Experience
My cousin Brian, in response to the horribly bad Wall Street Journal article I linked last night. Funny.
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MSNBC Decision Dashboard
Congrats to Jim, Ben, Tiff, Craig, Mike, and any other of my awesome friends at MSNBC who may have been involved in this site, which aggregates election stories, video, and data from all over the place into one beautifully-designed “dashboard.” Good stuff.
I’m obviously biased because I’m tight with several of the people there, but in my opinion, MSNBC.com has definitely proven to be the most innovative national news site over the past year or so.
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Derek Powazek: 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
Although I wouldn’t consider any of these revolutionary (we did almost all of the at the Journal-World, they’re definitely good tips for any newspapers adding comments to their sites.
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EveryBlock adds Charlotte and Philly
Congrats to my friends at EveryBlock, who have launched a couple new cities, as well as some new functionality. Good stuff.
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Mike Davidson: Enterprise CMSes vs. Blog CMSes
A good discussion ensures after Mike asks a simple question: for news organizations, which is better, a blog CMS or an enterprise CMS? My answer? They both suck.
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42 Topics: An Interview with Adrian Holovaty
A nice interview with Django co-creator and “journalism via programming” pioneer Adrian Holovaty. If you’ve been drinking Adrian’s kool-aid for a while (as I have), you’re not likely to find much new here, but if you aren’t familiar with Adrian and what he does, this interview should give you a nice overview.
42 Topics also has interviews with several others in the Django community, including Jacob Kaplan-Moss and James Bennett, available for your perusal.
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Mario Garcia has a blog
Newspaper design legend Mario Garcia now has a blog. Nice.
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Boston.com: The Big Picture
A great a simple idea: show awesome photos from great photojournalists really freaking big. It works great. The only thing I wish it has was a more readily available link to the related story (as far as I can tell, you have to click through and scroll down to the bottom to find the story link). Good stuff.
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Big Daily’s ‘Hyperlocal’ Flop
The Wall Street Journal has a piece on LoudounExtra.com, the hyperlocal piece Rob Curley and his team put together while at The Washington Post’s interactive subsidiary. WSJ calls the site a “flop” and talks at length about how Rob and his team failed to generate even the traffic they got in Lawrence, which has three times fewer residents than Loudoun County.
I have no idea why the site never generated the traffic numbers they were hoping for, but I definitely don’t believe this should be taken as an indication that hyperlocal is no longer a good strategy. But news organizations should also understand that hyperlocal is also not a magic bullet. There are many other factors at play when it comes to figuring out if one of the sites is going to succeed or not, and chances are no one — not even Rob F’ing Curley — has the midas touch to ensure every single project they work on is going to be a mega-hit.
One thing is for sure, though: sites can not continue to be successful simply by being LJWorld.com and Lawrence.com clones. Teams need to continue to innovate and come up with new and interesting ways to get the news in front of consumers. The biggest thing Lawrence.com did was something different. Lawrence.com has been basically exactly the same site since its inception in 2001. This was Rob’s vision, and it was executed very, very well. Since then, it has forged a plethora of clones across all sorts of markets — some successful, and some not. Seven years in Internet time is an eternity, and I don’t mind saying that because I know the guys working on Lawrence.com now understand it’s a project that drastically needs to redefine itself, and its place as one of the most innovative interactive news projects ever launched (I have it on good word that redefinition is coming in the relatively near future).
Bottom line? Being “hyperlocal” isn’t enough to get you anywhere, anymore. You need to be innovative and captivating. As much as I respect the team behind LoudounExtra.com, I’m not entirely sure it upped the ante any.
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Rob Curley and his team are off to Vegas, baby.
Rob (who, by the way, says I called him a dick, when I never did any such thing — but now I think he’s sort of a dick for saying I called him a dick), and his team are leaving The Washington Post for The Las Vegas Sun, as many expected. Congrats and good luck, guys!
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2008 EPpy Winners Announced
Big congrats to my old cronies at the Lawrence Journal-World (Best News Web Site with fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors), as well as my friends at MSNBC.com (Best Community Web Site with over 1 million unique monthly visitors), and The New York Times (Best News Web Site with over 1 million unique monthly visitors and others).
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Web natives need to lead Web operations
> Web operations can only thrive when they are staffed by people who get the Web and enjoy using the Web. These are people who categorically prefer the Web over print publications. If this doesn’t describe your journalism organization, then you are doing something wrong.
Word.
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Obituaries not available on dailygazette.com
> The Daily Gazette has chosen not to publish obituaries on its Web site to preserve the value of its print and paid online editions. To view obituaries from The Daily Gazette online, you can subscribe to the paid electronic edition by clicking here.
This is probably the most egregious example of “not getting it” I’ve ever seen in the online journalism world.
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CNN now lets you buy tee-shirts with their headlines on them
Check out the “latest news” section — see the tee-shirt icon next to each story? If you click it, you can buy a shirt with that headline on it. Seriously. This is probably the worst idea in the history of the internet. Wow. The best part, though, is that the headline is URL-encoded in the URI, so I was able to make my own.
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Is Rob Curley leaving WaPo?
“According to sources close the situation,” Rob may be planning to bolt from The Post and head to The Las Vegas Sun. Knowing a few people at the Sun, and knowing a bit about Rob (though I don’t really know him personally), I could see it happening — but who knows.
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New York Magazine redesigns
Nice redesign of NYMag.com — I have some small beefs in places, but mostly I think this is really well done and fits their brand nicely.
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IT Conversations: Adrian Holovaty
Jon Udell interviews Adrian Holovaty, creator of Django, EveryBlock, and ChicagoCrime, and all-around computer journalism guru. 41-minute MP3.
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Rex Sorgatz: A Data Point on Every Block
My buddy Rex, formerly of MSNBC.com, interviews Adrian Holovaty on his awesome startup venture Everyblock. This is absolutely the best interview with Adrian since the launch.
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Django boot camp for journalists by journalists
Matt Waite (of the St. Petersburg Times) is joining up with Derek Willis, Aron Pilhofer and Brian Hamman of the New York Times, Chase Davis of the Houston Chronicle and Ben Welsh of the Los Angeles Times to put on a Django training session for journalists. This is a freaking great idea, with a freaking great lineup of guys behind it. Anyone who is remotely interested in database journalism should be there. Matt says:
> A group of us who believe data-driven web development is an important part of the future of news are teaming up to teach the basics of Django in eight classes spread out over two-and-a-half days. Are you going to walk out and create EveryBlock? No way in hell. But you will learn the basics of a simple Django application — from setting up your app to building your models to writing views to building templates and displaying your data.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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