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 has been in development for the past year or so and is expected to launch this summer, is being financed by Allbritton Communications, which also owns the online political site Politico. TBD editor general manager Jim Brady has said that the new venture is designed to be hyper-local and community-oriented, and the blog network is at the core of that idea (the Washington Post also partners with a network of local blogs). The company says it has built up a core of almost 100 local bloggers who cover the Washington area from a number of different perspectives, and content from these blogs will appear alongside news and opinion writing from TBD staff.
Ken Doctor looks at the newsonomics of TBD on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.
TBD has added 50 new positions, all additional to the approximately 50 jobs ported over from the former NewsChannel 8. Jim Brady, TBD’s general manager, outlined the 50 for me: “About 30 doing news, including 15 reporters, six editors, two senior editors, six community engagement people. Another 20 doing tech, sales, product, and design.”
That tells us that the nut for TBD is about $3.5-4 million, salaries and operating costs combined. It needs to find new revenue — exclusive of what the former NewsChannel 8’s sales staff of seven brought in — to get to profitability. Profitability is a key goal for this for-profit company, and one key to proving out the model for use in other metro areas. The cost side is one of the areas that distinguishes the TBD experiment; it’s two to four times bigger than most of the local online news startups we’ve seen.
Steve Myers at Poynter Online also talked to TBD about transparency and other features.
TBD has built several features into its site that emphasize transparency as well as traditional journalism values such as fairness and accuracy.
Every article on the site will be accompanied by a “complete this story” feature, where reporters will acknowledge weaknesses in the reporting and ask for the community’s help in filling those gaps. “That’s not a strength of most media organizations, to say what they don’t know,” Brady said.
Users’ responses will go to a group of five or six editors and managers, who will review them and send them to a reporter if they look promising. The editors may credit the contributor if they have permission.
Likewise, Volpe said the site will be “very aggressive” about correcting errors, placing corrections at the top of stories, collecting them on a central page and perhaps hosting a corrections blog. (Brady noted that the Post has done a good job of that too.)
“For sources that go directly to reporters, Erik has made it very clear that reporters will not suppress corrections,” Volpe said.
Maps The Ushahidi people have launched crowdmap, a tool for aggregating news and information – including from mobiles – and visualising it on a map/timeline.
One of the most common criticisms of the news in the Internet age is that people read only stories whose slant they agree with. Two University of Chicago researchers challenged that assumption in a paper that argued that people are far more open-minded to opposing ideas than we think.
Saying no to Knight
From Nieman Journalism Lab an interesting post about a data visualisation start-up which turned down a Knight News Challenge grant.
Normally when you win a Knight News Challenge grant, there’s not much of a question about what to do. You take the money! But for Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of Flowing Media, winning in the 2010 competition prompted a tough decision. Ultimately, the data visualization team, responsible for such Internet classics as NameVoyager and Many Eyes, decided to turn down the grant. “We had to think very hard about this,” Viegas told me. “It wasn’t going to work for us.”
The reason: Viegas and Wattenberg didn’t like the open-source component of the News Challenge grant agreement, which requires that winners share all work done under the grant under a copyleft license that maximizes openness. “The licensing requirements weren’t right for us, or the project, really,” Viegas explained. (Their pitch was for a data visualization tool for news organizations; they declined to go into more detail than that.)
All Evolving Newsroom
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.
Ken Doctor looks at the newsonomics of TBD on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.
Steve Myers at Poynter Online also talked to TBD about transparency and other features.
Maps
The Ushahidi people have launched crowdmap, a tool for aggregating news and information – including from mobiles – and visualising it on a map/timeline.
Slate shows us a political map of the news in the US.
Saying no to Knight
From Nieman Journalism Lab an interesting post about a data visualisation start-up which turned down a Knight News Challenge grant.