Interesting idea in David Berkus’s HBR piece on innovation. He writes that companies often think that to be innovative means they need more ideas, but really they need to be better at recognising ideas that are already there. He mentions an idea market: Rite-Solutions has set up an “idea market” on their internal website where …
Continue reading “‘Every employee gets virtual $10,000 to invest in ideas’”
Three takeaways from Jeff Bezos’s meetings with staff at the Washington Post (2013). Bezos, founder of Amazon, agreed to buy the Washington Post for US$250m. Asked how he would define success, Bezos replied: growth. Continuing to contract by cutting the staff would lead to extinction, he said, “or, at best, irrelevance.” “All businesses need to be young …
Continue reading “‘If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s’”
A couple of takeaways from Sim Ahmed’s StopPress wrap on the financial challenges facing New Zealand’s news companies. I really like NBR publisher Todd Scott’s line on paywalls: People are willing to pay for quality content. However, there’s an expectation from the readers that’s very demanding. Companies shouldn’t get involved with paywalls if they’re not …
Continue reading “Demanding readers require you to deliver more under a paywall”
Huffington Post is changing its commenting policy, putting an end to anonymous accounts and requiring users to be ‘verified internally’. As of next month, Huffington Post users won’t be able to create anonymous accounts to post on the site; going forward, their identities will have to be verified internally. HuffPost recognizes that many people are …
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Of the many subscription emails I get a day, the one from Quartz stands out. I always open it and I almost always click several links. There’s something about the personality of the emails, the choice of links, which resonates for me. So I was interested to read this 2013 post from MailChimp on how Quartz …
Continue reading “Quartz’s emails resonate with me. I’m not alone.”
I like this interactive map of road deaths from the Pulitzer Center. It shows road deaths around the world along with breakdowns of how well road laws are enforced and deaths by vehicle (car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian). The map, based on World Health Organisation data, is really light to use and very interesting. New Zealand has 9.1 …
Continue reading “Roads Kill – a good interactive story map”
Joseph Rickerts took some notes when Nate Silver was speaking to a crowd of statisticians at Joint Statistical Meetings 2013. Joseph recorded 11 points made by Nate. A few are below but worth checking them all out. Data requires context. Nate mentioned an article about the population of China that included the fact that China …
Continue reading “Journalists ‘should read Thinking, Fast and Slow’”
Nice. Quartz launched a new take on comments, allowing readers to add ‘annotations’ in the margins of their stories – at paragraph level. Love this idea way more than comments stuck in a block way down the bottom of a story. “With annotations, you can now add to Quartz stories on the level of individual paragraphs. Just …
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There’s a nice interactive piece from the Knight Foundation explaining why contests like its News Challenge are a great way for philanthropic organisations to meet new people and find projects they would never have thought of themselves. The piece notes some of the world’s most useful discoveries arose through contests – determining longitude of a …
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Nice piece on Fast Company about Knight Foundation CEO and President Alberto Ibargüen. It was he who launched the Knight News Challenge. “Rules get in the way. “This was the guiding principle under which John S. and James L. Knight Foundation CEO and president Alberto Ibargüen launched the Knight News Challenge seven years ago, a contest that has …
Continue reading “How ditching the rules helped Knight change journalism”
