Yes, it’s paywall time. As Felix Salmon in an article in Columbia Journalism Review, “It’s paywall season right now: The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, theTelegraph, the Sun—all have recently announced plans to erect paywalls in an attempt to extract subscription revenues from their most loyal online readers.” Some pundits who had been emphatically…
GENERAL
Twitter strategy in newsrooms: organisational vs individual accounts
What kind of strategy should organisations pursue when it comes to the individual Twitter accounts of journalists? Some organisations have not taken too kindly to individual accounts. And even if they have, there often are caveats in place, which can sometimes can hinder creativity and freedom given the nature of the social media in question.…
Four easy ways to spruce up your online story pages
The ‘routine’ story pages on news sites don’t often get the treatment that some other pages get; maybe because of CMS limitations or dull templates that see those pages as a kind of ‘print dump’. That is really disappointing because newsrooms have always been in the business of packaging stories and presenting them effectively –…
Using Google Docs for liveblogging and a brief look at some other tools
Some CMSs that are used in the newsrooms have a liveblogging interface built into them but I know of ones that come without such a feature. So, while I was updating my list of liveblogging tools I came across a nifty way of using Google Docs for just this very purpose. The folks at Google…
Using a totally new kind of WYSIWYG editor in the newsroom
Here is an amazing deployment of a new-generation WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor in the newsroom. The editor, called Aloha, capitalizes on the latest version of HTML – the mark-up language used for rendering web pages – to deliver a totally new kind of editing experience. (Correction – added Oct 30,…
Here’s how to deploy Editor’s picks on Google News and give added visibility to your news site
Google News has started rolling out the latest round of changes to the different international versions of its site; and one feature that news sites could leverage to give added visibility to their sites is to deploy Editors’ picks . Introduced in August in the US version of Google News, Google has now started extending…
The usefulness of topic pages on news sites
Many new-generation content management systems that drive news sites have an in-built capacity to generate topics pages and populate them with links to content. But combining an automated system with manual curation – which is what sites like the New York Times have been doing, makes a world of difference to topics pages. Its hard…
A cool tool in the making: Slate’s ‘Plain English’, a jargon buster
Sounds too good to be true but just imagine how useful this tool would be: you input jargon into it and get clean understandable English as the output. This is something I came across on ‘Slate Labs’, which presents Slate’s experiments in multimedia jounralism. Before you get set to follow the link, let me warn…
Magazine sites editorially sync with traffic
The trend of giving weightage to traffic stats while making content-related decisions has caught up with magazine websites. This is just one of the things that caught my attention when I read the recent Columbia Journalism Review survey of standards and practices at magazine websites. I guess that this trend holds good to some extent…
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