Monthly Archives: August 2009

MSNBC acquires everyblock.com

By Julie Starr | Published: August 23, 2009

Everyblock.com announced this week that it has been acquired by news organisation MSNBC.com. Everyblock.com takes data from local government, libraries, police, emergency services and many more sources and ‘arranges it’ geographically so that visitors to the website can get a picture of what’s happening on their street. They can see figures for house listings, crime, [...]

Posted in Business Models, Journalism | Tagged data, microlocal, source code | Leave a comment

Wrap: Murdoch, NBR, Fairfax, paywalls, book clubs and Glastonbury

By Julie Starr | Published: August 12, 2009

Phew, what a week. Rupert Murdoch gives plenty of notice that he plans to introduce paywalls on all his news websites (prompting speculation that he’s signalling to fellow newspaper owners to hurry up with their own paywall plans): NEWS Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch has announced the company will charge readers to access [...]

Posted in Business Models, Journalism, Newspapers | Tagged Fairfax, Murdoch, NBR, paywalls | 5 Comments

Never mind think pieces, tell me how stuff works

By Julie Starr | Published: August 12, 2009

An interesting observation from Spot.us founder David Cohn in this Nieman Lab video interview - readers will pay for stories that explain how things work in their community, but not for think pieces. Spot.us works by inviting members of its community to suggest and respond to story ideas and then to pay for those which they most [...]

Posted in Journalism | Tagged community, funding, Journalism, spot.us | Leave a comment

Twitter is ‘NZ’s 39th most popular website’

By Julie Starr | Published: August 3, 2009

A couple of pull-outs from Hitwise‘s latest newsletter. Twitter NZ’s 39th most popular website in June; nzherald.co.nz is media site with most downstream traffic The popularity and growth of Twitter (www.twitter.com), the micro-blogging service, has been astonishing over the past 12 months increasing its market share by over 14 times in All Categories (comparing June [...]

Posted in Newspapers, Social Media | Tagged hitwise, nzherald.co.nz, Twitter | 1 Comment