links for 2009-07-09

‘Journalists will need changed culture, changed organisation and an improved understanding of the modern tools of journalism – audience insights, blogging, Twitter, multimedia production. It sounds like being pretty challenging…But I suspect that the public may well appreciate a journalism that puts serving their information needs at its heart, rather than one which is about organising the world in the way that journalists prefer.’

We now geo-code every story on our site, every piece of content. We either add an exact latitude and longitude to it or, if we don’t have that, then we try to at least get it down to the zip code. Soon, if you give your zip code you can have all of those stories now on one page. You can have all of the home foreclosures and homes that have been sold on that page; you can have all the crimes. We can show you all the rotary club meetings, all the high school shows that are in your zip code, the movie listings that are closest to you… We’ve build the page so that it works very much like iGoogle does, so you can move all the boxes around in any order that you want.

But the idea wasn’t that we were going to have a reporter for every community; it was, how do we get really great information for the community and then just layer on the stories that we know will interest the most amount of people?

“I regret to inform you that BeatBlogging.Org’s funding will be running out in about two months.
It has been a great ride. We’ve chronicled a lot innovative beat reporters and news organizations and have helped highlight best practices. I hope through the work that we have done that we have helped journalists learn how harness the power of social media, blogging and other Web tools to help improve beat reporting.
BeatBlogging.Org will not, however, be disappearing. There is still work to be done and innovation to be chronicled. BeatBlogging.Org is too strong of a brand to let die.
Unless a journalism non-profit or university steps up to bring BeatBlogging.Org in house, this project will most likely be going volunteer only.”

“After a few minutes of the audience tittering bemusedly at our antics, an uncomfortable realisation began to dawn on me: these young folk couldn’t give a toss about who owned the Standard – or indeed any other newspaper or media organisation. I’m older than Matt, but both of us are journalists who came of age during the Wapping strike, when Rupert Murdoch, having bought The Times, broke the print unions.”