Seattle Post-Times

Social metrics for Seattle news media: Newsdex Seattle relaunched

Image by WSDOT via Flickr

My friend, former colleague and neighbor Gary Love has lent his coding expertise to my sputtering hobby website, Newsdex Seattle. It is now a daily measurement of the social networks of metro-Seattle news outlets and other media.

We even include Dan Savage and Jenni Hogan (shown at left)! I repeat: We even include Dan Savage and Jenni Hogan! Are you listening, Web spiders?

Newsdex Seattle has a new interactive tool, complete with bar charts and a lengthy ranking from The Seattle Times on down.

Details about what we're doing are here.

My hobby

I've been building a vaguely defined website at seattle.newsdex.us which at this point consists merely of a weekly ranking of metro Seattle news Twitter accounts and links to lists at the site's Twitter page, @NewsdexSEA.

I'm thinking about going national! Maybe worldwide! If I get around to it.

Suggestions? Whatever I do, it needs to be easily automated or similarly low-maintenance. The weekly Twitter ranking I compile is in a FileMaker database which I populate and massage for posting on the Web through a series of Automator workflows. Only takes me about 10 minutes.

The Twitter lists:

• metropugetnews
• seattlenews
• hyperlocal
• transpo
• officialdom
• emergency
• orgs
• artsculturelife
• sports
• newspeople

Back in the game

Next week I'll become a paid journalist again as an editor at The Daily Herald in Everett, Wash. I'm really looking forward to returning to the news business after a detour of unemployment and a brief stint in corporate communications.

The Herald, owned by the Washington Post Co., is a newspaper with a great heritage, serving a county of about 711,100 people just north of Seattle — within commuting range of our home in northeast Seattle. Snohomish County and Everett are home to Boeing's biggest commercial airplane factory — which also is the biggest building in the world — and to a Navy base that is home to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

My title at The Herald will be design news editor. I'll be involved in the Web site to a great degree but I'll also be designing pages for the print edition. (Never thought I'd work with InDesign again.) I will also be a lead in the planning and development of Web-first news content.

This will be the second Herald I've worked for. I started my post-college journalism career at the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Wash.

Metro Seattle general news Twitter rankings

I might make this a regular thing. Let me know if I'm missing anybody with more than 1,000 followers.

Snapshot taken Friday, Oct. 1, 2010.

1.	@seattletimes	22,180
2.	@king5seattle	14,743
3.	@seattleweekly	12,138
4.	@seattlemag	10,391
5.	@kiro7seattle	8,260
6.	@westseattleblog	7,979
7.	@seattlepi	7,277
8.	@komonews	6,063
9.	@seattlemet	5,274
10.	@nwcn	4,930
11.	@q13fox	4,147
12.	@thenewstribune	3,408
13.	@strangerslog	3,277
14.	@myballard	3,248
15.	@techflash	3,239
16.	@komonewsradio	2,862
17.	@seattleglobe	2,711
18.	@psbj	2,585
19.	@mygreenlake	2,554
20.	@seattlest	2,518
21.	@publicolanews	2,505
22.	@pnwlocalnews	2,490
23.	@wallyhood	2,184
24.	@seatransitblog	2,152
25.	@everettherald	2,009
26.	@btownblog	1,869
27.	@thenewp2	1,815
28.	@fremontuniverse	1,486
29.	@seacrime	1,470
30.	@queenanneview	1,439
31.	@columbiacity	1,422
32.	@phinneyridge	1,351
33.	@phinneywood	1,259
34.	@crosscut	1,066

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Classic news-design values on the Web

I've always had a lot of interest in the visual components of journalism and consider myself a decent amateur photographer. I'm actually kind of anal about it. A messy design really impedes my enjoyment of fine journalism. When my own published writing has suffered under poor design, I have felt unreasonably disappointed. In my routine digestion of news, I have to make a real effort to overlook poor design and recognize otherwise good work.

I was looking at something on Time.com today and thought about this, because Time was one of the early influencers of my news-design sensibilities, along with National Geographic. Both magazines were ubiquitous in our household when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, and I learned a lot by watching how their designs evolved. I also learned a lot from Life's photography and from watching our Michigan newspapers migrate from vertical to horizontal modules in their layouts. But the visual presentation in Time and NG always seemed to be eons ahead of everybody else's.

Papa's got a brand-new brand

Image via Wikipedia

And we're back!

I tried on corporate communications and decided the fit wasn't terrific — though I sure learned a lot about big enterprises, Boeing, and myself. So I'm returning to journalism. I've got a couple of news irons in the fire, all of them in the Seattle area, and I hope to decide on a new gig soon. (Speaking of irons in the fire, a real brand is the new tattoo. You heard it here first.)

Meantime, a former colleague asked me what I read to keep up with news at the intersection of journalism and technology, and I sent her this list of the sites I follow most closely, in no particular order:

• CyberJournalist
• MediaShift Idea Lab
• PBS MediaShift
• Nieman Journalism Lab
• Online Journalism Review
• paidContent
• Poynter Online NewsPay
• Reflections of a Newsosaur
• Steve Outing

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Back to Boeing is where I'm going

Image by Dave Sizer via Flickr

Last summer I worked for the Integrated Defense Systems division of Boeing for about five minutes. The project I was contracted for was suddenly canceled. (Long story.) At the time, I had written somewhat of a farewell to journalism, which, of course, I had to retract.

I'm going back to Boeing next week to do something similar — to advise them on the use of the Web and social media. It's a three-month gig in Renton, this time with the Commercial Airplanes division, which is more a comfort zone given my background of covering the company for The Seattle Times.

I have also been consulting on some media projects recently, advising Sports Press Northwest in advance of its launch, as well as NewsCloud, a software company that is developing news applications for Facebook.

A big journalism confab to kick off 2010

Before we all disappear into the holidays, I want to put in a plug for a conference I'll be attending shortly thereafter, here in Seattle. It's called "Re-Imagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest" and is organized by a national organization called Journalism That Matters. Actually, they're billing it as an "un-conference," which means the agenda will evolve over a period of days:

An overall convening starts with several hundred people, then quickly self-organizes into a series of smaller interest groups which report out ideas and action steps to the whole.

It will be held Thursday through Sunday, Jan. 7-10, at the University of Washington. You need to register in advance.

Two visions of electronic-tablet magazines

If you're wondering where it's all going, here are two similar visions of how the magazine format might be revived by the tablet platform pioneered by Kindle and soon to be enjoined by Apple.

This first video, by Bonnier R&D, is the most artful and simple imagining of the experience:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

You might already have seen this vision, of Sports Illustrated:

There's no reason newspapers and other news media couldn't adopt this format. (Even the annual SI swimsuit issue "coming to life" in this demo.) I foresee an explosion in Web development and design to accommodate the tablet/touchscreen form factor.

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As bullets fly, the Seattle Times tweets

In the age of Twitter and streaming police radio communication, the bar for a newspaper is high when news breaks. Over the past couple of years we've come to see that crowd-sourced journalism is well suited to fast-breaking news. Thousands of eyes on the streets (or ears listening to the police scanner) can be a substitute for authoritative reporting — to a point, at least.

Meanwhile, among news outlets still practicing one-to-many journalism, television has long held the edge on timeliness, with helicopters and live pictures.

So when four Lakewood, Wash., cops were slain in the Tacoma suburb of Parkland this week and a manhunt ensued, news junkies of course turned to Twitter to find out, to report, and to opine. The first person to report the apparent capture of fugitive Maurice Clemmons was a scanner-listener. Out in the real world, the helicopters were scrambled and the microwave masts were raised and press conferences were broadcast. A typical 21st century response to news.

But in the end — no, come to think of it, from the beginning — the story of four dead cops and one dead suspect was owned by our legacy ink-on-paper monolith, The Seattle Times. With as big a newsroom bureaucracy as they come, the Times turned a nimble double play by providing deep reportage and super-timely alerts, many from the streets.