The Evolving Newsroom

Business models, Malaysiakini, China and more

Earlier this year I was invited to attend the international Reporting New Realities media conference in Hong Kong. With financial help from the Asia NZ Foundation I was able to not only go to the conference but also spend a few days exploring Hong Kong and, very briefly, Guangzhou in southern China. The latter was [...]

Link wrap: TBD, maps, saying no to Knight

My browser is close to exploding under the weight of so many open tabs so I’m in tab-clearing mode this morning. Here’s a link wrap of things that lodged in my brain for one reason or another recently. TBD Mathew Ingram does a nice round-up on two US local-news-and-blog-network initiatives, TBD and GrowthSpur. TBD.com, which [...]

‘Distinctions between TV, radio & web will go’

Via RWW come some thoughts on what’s ahead from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content. Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly. Five years is a factor of [...]

Next time things get weird I’ll think of this

I’m reading former CIA director Allen W Dulles’ book about the intelligence business. Why? No particular reason. Saw it in Parsons on a Wellington trip earlier this year and it looked interesting. In a chapter about how deception is used by intelligence folk he gives an example of how a rigged accident can be used [...]

The beauty of checklists

I’ve just read The Checklist Manifesto, a lovely little book by Anul Gawande, a surgeon and New Yorker writer who wrote a notable piece last year about finding that more expensive healthcare wasn’t necessarily better healthcare. The premise of the book is that a simple (but well devised) checklist is perhaps the best tool we [...]

Times of India in top 10 for New Zealanders

A couple of things caught my eye in Hitwise‘s latest New Zealand newsletter. The first is that nzherald.co.nz made it to number 10 on the list of online department stores: Top 10 Shopping and Classifieds – Department Stores based on Visits for December 2009 1.    Amazon.com                 [...]

Nigel, blogging and movie critics

Nice to see Nigel Horrocks blogging at www.aikenstix.com. I enjoyed his post on the declining relevance of movie critics, particularly this part: Today, I picked up the printed programme for a film festival about to hit my town and gave up trying to work out what each movie was about. I’m sure there were a [...]

Copyright, findability and other ideas from #ndf

I was at the National Digital Forum conference in Wellington earlier this week mingling with people involved in digitising and curating New Zealand’s cultural heritage material – people from museums, galleries, archives, libraries. I was struck by a few commonalities between the cultural heritage sector (known as GLAM – Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and the [...]

Got any stories to sell over the silly season?

I’m launching an online marketplace shortly where you can sell and buy news features, profiles, reviews and other stories. It’s called All About The Story and the idea is to use the web to make it easier for writers to sell their stories, test the market for new kinds of storytelling, and to make it [...]

Bring it on: wireless electricity