Mediagazer: What newsrooms can learn from tech startups (Lauren Rabaino/10,000 Words)

8:00 PM ET, February 21, 2011

Top News:

Josh Halliday / Guardian:

Libya: journalists prepare for ‘floodgates to open’ — Newspaper journalists and broadcasters descend on Libyan border as uprising threatens Muammar Gaddafi's 41-year rule — Journalists from newspapers and broadcasters across the world, including ITV News and the New York Times …

Discussion: New York Times, hrw.org, Washington Post, The New Yorker Blog, allAfrica.com, The Daily Dish and On Media's Blog

Jack Shenker / Guardian:
Egypt's media undergo their own revolution

Discussion: Editors Weblog

Matt Mullenweg:

Blogging Drift — The New York Times has a pretty prominent article today called Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter. The title was probably written by an editor, not the author, because as soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging …

Discussion: Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard and Gatekeeper

Verne G. Kopytoff / New York Times:

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter — SAN FRANCISCO — Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook …

Discussion: TechCrunch, toni.org, Latest Open Salon Blog, Rebooting The News, @rklau, Adotas, Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com, Stowe Boyd, Teds Take, Marx Layne, Mark Evans Tech, The Wire, Gothamist, Soup and @mathewi, more at Techmeme »

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

TV Industry Taps Social Media to Keep Viewers' Attention — By the time the first ballot is opened at the Academy Awards next Sunday, millions of people will be chatting about the awards show on the Internet. And ABC will be ready. — Trying to exploit viewers' two-screen behavior …

Discussion: Echo, @twittermedia, @carr2n, @mathewi and Jezebel

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

DST About To Lead Huge Spotify Funding — European streaming music startup Spotify is in the process of closing a very large financing, say multiple sources. DST, the venture firm that has backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, is said to be leading the deal, which values Spotify at around $1 billion.

Discussion: GigaOM, SAI, DealBook, VentureBeat, paidContent:UK, Music Ally and Side-Line, more at Techmeme »

Patrick Thornton / Poynter:

How journalists are using metrics to track the success of tweets — When I first started on the BeatBlogging.org project almost three years ago, very few journalists and news organizations were using social media. In fact, you were considered kind of strange if you used social media.

Discussion: Journalism.co.uk

David Carr / New York Times:

2 Platforms, With 2 Sets of Problems — Digital subscriptions, a grail for the mainstream media that often seemed more like a mirage, took on some firm if not altogether friendly dimensions last week. — Traditional print publishers have spent the past few years cast in the role …

Discussion: Technology Liberation Front, Mediactive, MacStories, Media Buyer Planner, MediaPost and Monday Note, more at Techmeme »

Damon Kiesow / Poynter:

The Washington Post's Trove targets news personalization, digital innovation — Describing the personalized aggregation service Trove as a “next generation” news experience, The Washington Post's Vijay Ravindran figures it probably won't save journalism on its own, but it's a start.

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

McSweeney's latest love note to newspapers: The Goods — If I was looking for an easily identifiable trigger for my love of reading, it would most likely be devouring Peanuts (and later Calvin and Hobbes) in the Sunday Star Tribune as a kid. (Whether that had anything to do with my decision to work in newspapers is harder to trace.

Glenn Greenwald / Salon:

The NYT's journalistic obedience — Earlier today, I wrote in detail about new developments in the case of Raymond Davis, the former Special Forces soldier who shot and killed two Pakistanis on January 27, sparking a diplomatic conflict between the U.S. (which is demanding that he be released …

Discussion: New York Times, TPMMuckraker, AOL News and Boing Boing

David Folkenflik / NPR:

U.K. Papers' Paywalls A Test Of Relevance — Conventional wisdom says readers are only willing to pay for online news that fuels their passion or helps them make money. Across the Atlantic, however, a pair of leading daily newspapers have ignored that conventional wisdom …

Discussion: @tolles, @davidfolkenflik and @davidfolkenflik

Jeremy W. Peters / Media Decoder:

Arianna Huffington, Media ‘Dahling’ — Arianna Huffington's distinctive Greek lilt is often imitated. — “Helllloooo, dahlings!” the familiar parody goes. But here's the problem: Arianna Huffington doesn't actually talk like that. Zsa Zsa Gabor does though, and that seems to be where the confusion has arisen.

Dominic Patten / The Wrap:

Comcast Seeking to ‘Destroy’ Writers Guild, Members Say — Comcast want “to destroy” the Writers Guild of America, say WGAW board members Chip Johannessen and Patric M. Verrone. — Johannessen (pictured right) and Verrone, in a statement posted on the Guild's website Sunday …

Lauren Rabaino / 10,000 Words:

What newsrooms can learn from tech startups — NYU journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen recently led a Web Journalists Chat on Twitter around the topic of “radical change in the newsroom” (see the highlights here). One of the reoccurring themes of the chat was that newsrooms need to radically revamp their culture.

Discussion: mediabistro.com