Tag: News Media

Blogging by Joe WilcoxJul 6, 201010:39 pm

TechCrunch and Woot play to AP’s Weakness

Some people—heck, some organizations—have no sense of humor. Humorless perhaps best describes Associated Press, which apparently didn’t get Woot’s joke about owing money for a blog excerpt. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler put AP in its place today, that’s assuming there isn’t yet a nasty takedown-notice response coming.

Some quick background: About two years ago, AP decided that no one should excerpt its content without paying for it. The policy defies decades of journalist practices and fair-use laws. I could understand AP going after blocks of text, but no, it’s the little excerpts, too. Excerpt up to 50 words and AP expects you to pay $17.50; 100 bucks for 251 words or more. The approach is controversial, as it should be.

News Media by Joe WilcoxJul 3, 20106:56 pm

MSNBC.com bets on Readers

I can’t much imagine how MSNBC.com could have designed a news site seemingly more unfriendly to generating static pageviews—unless there is some secret Google gaming formula. The secret sauce is there, and I love it. MSNBC.com’s updated news site pulls readers in rather than sending them out.

News Media by Joe WilcoxJul 3, 20104:25 pm

Coffee Shop Newsrooms

My fantasy newsroom is one where the public comes and goes (within reason, of course) and story ideas flow freely in all directions. In England in the 1600s, news grew out of coffeehouses this way. Decades later in the U.S. colonies, the venue of choice switched to pubs. (I like that journalism in America is tied up with drinking. Explains a lot.)

Here’s a big shout-out to the Freehold, New Jersey initiative above. I’m rooting for (literal) conversational journalism par excellence.
Doreen Marchionni

News Media by Joe WilcoxJun 22, 20102:10 am

Eight Reasons I Love Pop17

If Sarah Austin is the future of journalism, I have hope that accuracy, authenticity and accountability may yet survive. Yesterday, Sarah tumbleblogged something she posted 16 days earlier that I missed: “Blogging Code of Ethics.”

Now there’s a strange concept: Blogging and ethics. It’s strange because I’ve seen too many blogs acting as marketing fronts—and too many others scraping other sites’ content and reposting it for profit. In neither case does much fact checking go along with the blogs. I identified the problem in posts “The Difference Between Blogging and Journalism” and “Gossipers of the InterWeb.”

News Media by Joe WilcoxJun 5, 20104:20 pm

New Media Is All About Personality

New media—and social media, for that matter—share something in common with old media moguls: Personality, as in the persons so acutely identified with the organizations. The brands are big, but often no bigger than the people behind them.

News Media by Joe WilcoxApr 20, 20103:21 pm

'Damn Gizmodo'

Did you really need to publicly shame the poor guy with his full name and photo? Don’t you think he feels bad enough already? Did that really add anything to the story? You just took […]

Apple by Joe WilcoxApr 20, 201012:36 pm

Gizmodo Made the ‘Next iPhone’ a Great Story

I have deeply mixed feelings about siding with Apple and not Gizmodo regarding the iPhone prototype the Weblog paid to acquire. After all, as a seasoned journalist, I should strongly advocate no-questions-asked free speech. Instead, last night I blogged for Betanews: “Apple should sue Gizmodo over stolen iPhone prototype“. I had planned to write something here, but Betanews founder Nate Mook asked for a story, which I gladly delivered.

Apple by Joe WilcoxApr 14, 201011:22 am

The Dark Side of Steve Jobs

For the old-line moguls atop companies like Dow Jones, New York Times Company, Condé Nast and Time Inc., the excitement around the iPad must have seemed like a godsend: Suddenly, they could stick to their […]

News Media by Joe WilcoxApr 13, 20107:34 pm

Obama's Nuclear Summit Secrets

World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow…Reporters for foreign outlets, admitted for the first time to the White House press pool, got the impression that the vaunted American freedoms are not all they’re cracked up to be…even the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, was more talkative with the press than Obama…The restrictions have become a common practice for the Obama White House.
Dan Milbank

Apple by Joe WilcoxApr 8, 20109:45 pm

A Mashable Post Mortem

Yesterday, I raked Mashable’s Ben Parr for his assertion that Apple’s then yet unannounced mobile advertising platform posed a credible threat to Google. Now that Apple has announced iAd, and seeing how Ben’s rumor reporting was right about it coming, I circle back for a postmortem. Simply stated: I stand by my assertion that his sourcing was weak and that he didn’t support bold assertions that Apple’s still unreleased mobile ad platform is way ahead Google’s.

Apple by Joe WilcoxApr 7, 20101:02 pm

Mashable’s Apple Ad Platform Claims are Mush

Who spiked Ben Parr’s coffee with Apple “reality distortion field” Kool-Aid? The Mashable co-editor is gushing about Apple’s rumored mobile advertising platform and how it poses a credible threat to Google. Based on what? Among his other talents, Ben writes science fiction. Perhaps he confuses fact with fiction? Did he have a flashforward, another scifi concept, and see the future?

News Media by Joe WilcoxApr 5, 20107:53 pm

Gossipers of the InterWeb

Am I the only one to see the irony? March 31st New York Times post “The Rising Stars of Gossip Blogs” begins with a story about “a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer” breaking a big scoop about Business Insider: Fallen dot-com Wall Street analyst and risen dot-com media mogul Henry Blodget had fired John Carney, managing editor of the Clusterstock blog.