Dive into the archives.
- Starting a Newspaper
Seth Godin writes about he would start a newspaper with roughly six people or so. What about the institutions that have many more people already writing for publication?
When I was at The Times, a few of us had this idea, trying to capitalize on everyone’s belief that focusing on local news is [...]
- Hadoop’ing at My Desk
Last week, I started scrounging around the office for some unused PC’s. Unfortunately, they were more than just a few because of all the things going on at the Times. I grabbed three, put them on my desk and spent the rest of a day installing Ubuntu on them. Everything went really [...]
- Living Behind the Pay Wall
Techdirt has two really good posts today about making information hard-to-find when customers are looking for it.
The first deals directly with it by looking at newspapers holding their archives hostage by putting up a pay wall in front of them after a certain amount of time has passed. This is silly and yes, I [...]
- Campaign Finance API from the NY Times
The New York Times opened up an API to get data about campaign financing. Yes, I’m jealous that they did this before we did.
- Thought of the Day
Would it be such a terrible thing? If newspapers were managed by new groups of people with no real romantic link to the glory days of newspapers, and freed from management grown fat and lazy on the easy profits of the glory days of American local newspapers maybe titles can innovate again and start thinking [...]
- Political Browser
The Washington Post launched a new site, Political Browser. It looks like a very useful place to check every day for the latest political thoughts and ideas. I do find it a bit disheartening though that such a big deal is being made at the linking out to other sources of information. [...]
- Some things I’ve liked recently
Here’s a few things I’ve come across the last few days which are pretty nifty…
The Las Vegas Sun’s weather page. Extremely clean design with lots of data but easy to read and understand unlike ours.
EveryBlock is now in LA… Watch out.
Simple Update Protocol looks like a mix between a cache and sending out [...]
- Huffington Post Chicago
The Huffington Post Chicago site has launched and so far I’m impressed. Looks like a nice collection of opening day stories talking about the greatness of Chicago.
I found a few I liked, The Newspaper is Dead, Long Live the Newspaper, Blackhawk Down: Chicago’s Forgotten Franchise and Chicago Tribune’s Social Media Evolution.
One interesting [...]
- Opening the Archives
From Dan Gillmor
First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities’ histories and all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it — as they would all the [...]
