Two readers win trips to report with Nicholas Kristof in Africa
April 30, 2007
The New York Times has selected two readers to join New York Times Op-Ed and TimesSelect columnist,Nicholas D. Kristof, on a reporting trip to Africa this summer. The three will travel to Rwanda, Congo and Burundi, with all expenses covered by The Times, and will chronicle their experiences during the trip through blogs and vlogs for NYTimes.com.
Winners’ video reports and excerpts from their essays will also be featured on MySpace at www.myspace.com/winatrip. MySpace created a custom “Win a Trip With Nick” community during the application period, which attracted more than 1,300 “friends” of the “Win a Trip” program and enabled applicants to submit their essays and applications through MySpace, as well as NYTimes.com.
Additionally, winners’ video reports will air on mtvU, MTV’s 24-hour college channel, as well as on mtvU.com.
CNN.com’s Virginia Tech memorial
April 26, 2007
CNN.com has created a nice memorial site for the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings, with profiles of each of them that friends, family and others can add their comments to.
EPpy Awards Finalists named
April 25, 2007
washingtonpost.com was named a finalist in five categories of the 2007 EPpy Awards and nytimes.com and wsj.com each were named finalists in three categories. In all, 108 finalists were named in 33 categories, including two new categories: The Knight News Award for Innovation and the first EPpy Award for a Spanish-language media-affiliated Web site. EPpy winners will be announced at the Interactive Newspaper Conference and Trade Show in Miami on May 24.
Full list of finalists follows.
MTV.com redesigns, drops Flash for HTML
April 25, 2007
After a 9-month experiment with a Flash website and lots of complaints, MTV.com has redesigned its site in HTML. The site has also dropped the autoplaying video player embedded in the home page.
Fuller explanation from MTV follows…
Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog
April 25, 2007
Cambridge Community Television hosted a 3-month documentary production course that resulted in this short documentary on Citizen Journalism.
The 15-minute documentary Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog is a guide to US citizen journalism through the ages - from Thomas Paine in the 18th century to the more modern hows and whys of being an anti-establishment news hound.
The film features interviews with talking heads from the blogging world - including Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices - discussing, among other things, how newspapers have gone through major cost-cutting exercises as their revenues are leeched by sites like Craigslist.
Wikipedia emerges as key source for Virginia Tech shootings
April 24, 2007
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia,served as an essential news source for hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet trying to understand the shootings at Virginia Tech University last week, The New York Times reports.
According to the foundation that runs the various Wikipedias around the world, there were more than 750,000 visits to the main article on the shootings in its first two days, an average of four visits a second. Even The Roanoke Times, which is published near Blacksburg, Va., where the university is located, noted on Thursday that Wikipedia “has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event.”
Craig Newmark: Craigslist Isn’t a Media Menace
April 24, 2007
The king of free online classified advertising insists that Craigslist is not a threat to the newspaper industry. “It’s just a simple platform where people help each other out,” he tells I Want Media. “In a way, anyone can do what we do.”
nymag.com Launches New Entertainment Blog
April 24, 2007
Nymag.com, the Website of New York magazine, has launched two new entertainment offerings, a blog called Vulture and the daily e-mail newsletter Agenda.
From Vulture (http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment), users can expect both immediate access to entertainment and opinionated analysis of it. The blog will take lowbrow culture seriously and treat highbrow culture frivolously, blending witty recaps of TV shows, original concert footage, and Web video nuggets with irreverent coverage of critics, theater buzz, and news of book and movie deals as they happen. Vulture joins nymag.com’s popular daily blogs Grub Street (http://nymag.com/daily/food/) and Daily Intel (http://nymag.com/daily/intel/).
MySpace News launches
April 23, 2007
MySpace has launched its own Digg-like news site, in which users can vote on the most interesting stories.
MySpace News will automatically collect stories from thousands of news and blog sources and group them in hundreds of categories, then place them in order based on the votes, the Los Angeles Times says. The stories consist of a headline, one paragraph and a link to the full piece on the news site or blog where it originated. Sources will be selected on criteria including the number of links to them and how often the material is updated.
Tribune launched new ‘hyperlocal’ site
April 23, 2007
The Chicago Tribune has launched a new site where readers in the western and southern suburbs can post their own stories, submit photos and write blogs. Triblocal.com has a staff of four journalists charged with drumming up stories in an initial target area of nine towns, and the site will be largely unedited and self-policing.