Innovative News Stories of 2010

I say again, let us pay. Make the process as easy as possible. Make it invisible and transparent. Make us register once and once only. Walls are not the way forward, but walls are not the same thing as payment, and without some form of payment, the press will not be here in five years’ time. I hope one of the big organisations is working on this idea or something like it, because for print newspapers, the clock isn’t just ticking, it’s ticking louder and faster.

LRB · John Lanchester · Let Us Pay.

[M]ake a distinction between “formats” and “forms.” A hardback, a paperback, an audiobook, and many an ebook simply represent different forms of the same work. New formats, on the other hand, represent deeper changes in how authors develop content and readers consume it. The graphic novel is a recent format innovation in the West (albeit one with deep antecedents), as are the cell phone novels that have become popular in Japan.

via Tim O’Reilly, What lies ahead: Publishing – O’Reilly Radar.

The real loser here is the middle take. This is what the weeklies like Time and Newsweek have historically offered: reportage and essays produced a few days after major events, with a bit of analysis sprinkled on top. They’re neither fast enough to be conversational nor slow enough to be truly deep. The Internet has essentially demonstrated how unsatisfying that sort of thinking can be.

Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis | Magazine.

Some of this metadata is shared between both the collections management system and the DAM, but not all of it is in both. Each system has their own specific types of metadata. This sharing can even include the collections management system linking to the images in the DAM and not just data and vice versa (data to the images).

Content Technologies: DAM, CMS and Collections Management Systems – What’s the big dif? « Leala Abbott.

Podcasting is an often overlooked corner of the media world [....] The iTunes store from Apple, where about 75 percent of the audience for podcasts looks for fresh material, contains about 150,000 regular shows featuring has-been and up-and-coming comics and sex talk, as well as mainstream fare like NPR and CNN broadcasts. Edison Research estimates that a quarter of all Americans over the age of 12 have listened to or watched at least one.

via Jon Kalish, Leo Laporte Builds Empire With ‘This Week in Tech’ – NYTimes.com.

We have the ability to predict the performance of an article on the front page into the future—and empowered with that information we generate real-time recommendations on what articles to place where on the front page,” [Visual Revenue] CEO Dennis Mortensen wrote in a blog post.

Following Visual Revenue’s recommendations resulted in a 29 percent traffic boost for its nine beta publishers in November, Mortensen said in an email. If readers were reading an average of three stories on the homepage, for example, they started reading four.

via Adrianne Jeffries, Forget Real-Time, NY Startup Predicts Pageviews 15 Min Into the Future | The New York Observer.

I think the thing that attracts me most to Vanilla is its simplicity and elegance. Sure, it is incredibly powerful however this is not at the expense of usability. The admin interface is beautifully designed and intuitive to use. You can add categories, manage users, send out announcements and indeed do everything else you would expect without any documentation or training. It’s just obvious.

via Paul Boag, The forum is dead, long live Vanilla « Boagworld.