links for 2011-03-14

Our job is to curate the conversation that is happening all over the Internet with people who really understand what is going on,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN who founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while they were fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We amplify, contextualize and translate what these conversations are and why they are relevant.”

Our broadcast grants offer support for projects and programmes that engage an audience with issues in biomedical science in an innovative, entertaining and accessible way.

Failed news experiments have taught us a few things about what doesn’t work: Armies of citizen contributors will not replace all journalists, for example. Journalism savvy does not translate into business savvy. Grants are not a stable or enduring funding model.

Instead, my work studying the emerging landscape and my ongoing survey of new sites suggests two other trends. First, local sites are beginning to learn the importance of focusing as much on financial sustainability and revenues as on news creation. Second, they are learning, much as traditional news organizations are, that they need multiple revenue streams, not just one or two, to sustain themselves.

Pew also highlights some significant “firsts” across the online news universe, indicating that the move from print to web has reached an important tipping point. They are:

1) “Original reporting job hires at major online only news sites for the first time matched or exceeded the job losses in newspapers.”

2) “For the first time, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers.”

3) “When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time.”

We`ve seen a newspaper that has opened ten hyper-local Facebook pages in ten different towns. These pages immediately became more relevant, and more local.