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

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.

My friend helped find Wired's vanished writer

My friend Jeff Reifman, a Web developer and activist freelance journalist, has been busy. His crusade calling attention to Microsoft's Washington state tax dodge has gained some traction, leading to an interview on public KUOW-FM [25 MB MP3] in Seattle.

Jeff's also featured in the new issue of Wired — though not for getting Bill Gates and company to pay their taxes. Jeff is a key figure in the fascinating tale of how Wired readers tracked down writer Evan Ratliff, who in August decided to see if he could vanish from the grid. It's a fun read. Ratliff sets it up:

The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?

Enter Jeff:

On August 24, a former Microsoft group program manager in Seattle named Jeff Reifman read about the hunt in Wired. Reifman, self-employed these days, had recently launched a series of grant-funded Facebook applications to study the engagement of young people with the news. From a technical standpoint, the contest seemed intriguing.

On August 27, working on a desktop in his living room, he created Vanish Team, a Facebook app dedicated to information and discussion about Ratliff. He announced it on Twitter, and people began clicking over to check it out.

Gen Y doesn't use e-mail, except when it does

Image via Wikipedia

At the after-party of GonzoCamp last Friday, I was talking to a 32-year-old Drupal developer about that content-management platform and where it is headed, and for some reason we got talking about e-mail. I think I was saying that an effective news outlet needed to have easy and flexible e-mail tools — that, even in the Twitter age, e-mailed newsletters and alerts drive a lot of traffic to news Web sites. I get alerted to a lot of news that way — it's intrusive in a good way, ensuring I don't miss stories I don't want to miss.

This guy had seemed to know what he was talking about, so I was a little startled when he said, "Nobody uses e-mail anymore." He clarified that by saying that nobody his age or younger (Generation Y) uses e-mail much, and especially not to get news. Twitter is where most people his age find out about things that are happening. E-mail, he said, is dead. "It's an old lady in the hospital on life support."

Dear applicant: We might be idiots

Image via CrunchBase

I've hooked up with a Seattle programmer named John DeRosa, and we're in the early stages of developing a Web product. We aren't sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but we think the concept is strong and we decided to apply for a start-up incubator-like program in Mountain View, Calif., called Y Combinator.

This was a total long shot. They get more than 1,000 applications twice a year, choosing 50 or so fledgling projects for three months of guidance in launching a business. Most of their applicants are hackers young enough to be our children, some of them still in school. I think our idea has huge potential, but it is somewhat unlike what Y Combinator has backed in the past, so we were a little out of place from the start. The application process was not difficult, however, so we thought what the hell.

Well, we didn't make the cut, but the rejection was more than thoughtful — it was downright insecure!

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. The quality of the applications continues to increase with each cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of interviews we can do, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff

Having been in a position myself to deliver bad news via mass e-mailing, I was curious to know how well I've handled similar rejection messages. Thanks to the fact I have an archive of all my personal and professional e-mail dating back to 2002, I was able to find out.

Content factory: race to the bottom

Image by marissaorton via Flickr

Wired has a fascinating look at a growing business — the outsourcing of content creation. That's a fancy phrase for a system of buying stuff from freelance writers, you might think. But what we're really talking about here is nothing like the freelance-writing profession on which national magazines have long relied.

No, we're talking about a lean, mean text machine. We're talking about Demand Media, whose Demand Studios doles out freelance assignments to thousands of writers everywhere — really poor-paying freelance assignments.

In "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell," Daniel Roth walks us through a 21st century process by which high-priced search terms define the assignment and creation of content — and whose few human intervenors are paid inversely. This system requires limited human involvement:

How I surf the Web

I now use several browsers to surf the Web on my MacBook Pro:

• Apple's Safari is my default browser. It's the browser that is launched by links in e-mail, and it's what I use for general surfing of news, shopping, and other stuff. For me, Safari is faster than other free browsers, although it is often the last to be supported, or is unsupported, by third-party plug-ins. I also like the fact I can effortlessly sync my Safari bookmarks via MobileMe with my iPhone, on which Safari is my only browser option.

Formatting text for the Web

Image via Wikipedia

I was looking over some things I had written to help Crosscut reader-contributors prepare their writing for posting on the Web and came upon this. If I do say so myself, it's a cleverly concise primer on inline HTML formatting that you could use when writing for any Web site:

A failed experiment with free advertising

Image via CrunchBase

I've pulled the ads from the blog after experimenting for a couple of months. My traffic is very modest — it's in the triple digits per day. And modest, too, has been the ad revenue from Adify and Amazon: pennies per month. Even if I had exponentially greater traffic, the ad revenue would be paltry. I was essentially giving the ads away.

Not sure what I expected — I've been in the media business long enough to know better. But I wanted to experience the process from the perspective of a small publisher.

I don't understand how these ad networks can stay viable given the minuscule margins. I can't be the only publisher giving up, even if I'm one of the smallest.

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Microsoft should hire 'Needlenose Ned'

Microsoft has officially announced Bing, the long-rumored new search engine to replace Live Search. The company is describing Bing as a "decision engine." And if it works as well and looks as good as the company portrays it in this video, it could be a game-changer, especially if Microsoft is truly serious about marketing it.

Bing was announced at D7 and is available inside the company today but won't be public until next week.

Meantime, enjoy this scene from Groundhog Day:

Ned: Phil? Hey, Phil? Phil! Phil Connors? Phil Connors, I thought that was you!
Phil: Hi, how you doing? Thanks for watching.
[Starts to walk away]
Ned: Hey, hey! Now, don't you tell me you don't remember me because I sure as heckfire remember you.
Phil: Not a chance.
Ned: Ned ... Ryerson. "Needlenose Ned"? "Ned the Head"? C'mon, buddy. Case Western High. Ned Ryerson: I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing! Ned Ryerson: got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn't graduate? Bing, again. Ned Ryerson: I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple times until you told me not to anymore? Well?
Phil: Ned Ryerson?
Ned: Bing!
Phil: Bing.

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Google wags the dog

Image via CrunchBase

In an effort to repent for the sin of being a professional journalist, I've been following Jeff Jarvis' blog, BuzzMachine, which is a good deal about what idiots professional journalists are and how cool Google is. OK, I exaggerate. But Google has made Jarvis rich, compared to most Americans, and he doesn't even work there. He is the author of What Would Google Do? I don't know if his book is any good because I haven't read it, even though you can read it for free online. (I am now only reading books whose authors pay me.) But I do read Jarvis' blog, and it is provocative, and sometimes I even agree with him.

The other day Jarvis wrote about another blogger's essay. The other blogger was writing about Google's influence on the news business and, among other things, how people like Jarvis think it's a good thing, when in fact it's not. (Meta alert: I am now writing about a second writer writing about a third writer who is writing about the second writer.) Jarvis contends that, by its very existence, his own blog post about the other writer's essay proves Jarvis' point. To understand this, and I'm not sure I do, you need to read Jarvis' post. True enough, though, is that Jarvis writing about this other essay caused me to read the other essay, too, and reading the other essay enabled me to conclude that Jarvis is, actually and in point of fact, wrong in his assessment of the other essay.

The third writer, being correct, deserves his own paragraph of introduction, and I urge you to read his blog post, a small portion of which I quote below. He is Josh Young. The blog is called Networked News, and his essay is titled, "Not By Links Alone."

Wolfram Alpha's vague notion of the Great Lakes

I've been messing around with Wolfram Alpha, the hot new search thing, and it's pretty cool in that it is radically different from Google, Yahoo, and Live Search, or whatever Microsoft will be calling its search tool next week. The creators call Wolfram Alpha a "computational knowledge engine." Indeed, Wolfram Alpha is owned by Wolfram Research, the people who make the Mathematica application.

So you would think they'd be into precision. But as the accompanying map shows, they are not. Despite the fact Wolfram Research is headquartered in a state that adjoins Lake Michigan, the Great Lakes are a blob as far as Wolfram Alpha is concerned, as I learned when it otherwise skillfully pulled up the stats on my hometown, Albion, Mich. (red dot).

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Experimenting with a new tool

Image by chuck.taylor via Flickr

I just installed a tool on this blog called Snap Shots, which enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, and other tricks when you mouse over the little talk-balloon logos.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

I haven't decided if this is cool or annoying. It takes a while for the previews to load. Your feedback would be welcome.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt out.