Tutorial: The Transition to Digital Journalism

Introduction

Digital technology presents an often bewildering array of choices for journalists – producing slideshows and video, joining social networks and blogging, using map mashups and mobile devices. The list seems endless.

But survival requires understanding all these new technologies so journalists and news organizations can make informed decisions about why and how to utilize them (see Blogs, Tweets, Social Media, and the News Business, in Nieman Reports).

This guide covers the major digital tools and trends that are disrupting the news industry and changing the way journalists do their jobs.

Print and Broadcast News and the Internet

As more people consume news online, news organizations face the dilemma of reallocating resources to attract new readers and viewers while still trying to hold on to their existing, and usually aging, print or broadcast audiences.

Online revenues for most news media are still a small fraction of the income from traditional print or broadcast. And after many years of double-digit annual increases in online advertising revenue, the trend tapered off dramatically in 2008 and 2009, with online revenues flat or even decreasing.

For newspapers, typically 15 percent or less of total revenues come from online operations (although the Los Angeles Times reported in late 2008 that online income was enough to pay for the paper’s entire print and online news staffs).

Magazines similarly get less than 10 percent of their revenue from their digital operations according to an Advertising Age survey of 2008 revenues.

Financial viability for newspapers and most magazines, at least for now, requires retaining as many existing print readers as possible.

Yet the trends are clear: people, especially the young, are turning to the Internet for more and more of their news and developing an effective digital strategy is essential for long-term survivial:

* Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

* Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

For other and more detailed statistics on where people get their news see:

While the trend toward online is clear, not everyone is embracing it. As of the end of 2007, about 25 percent of people in the U.S. still said they hadn’t ever been online.

For print and broadcast organizations, this means a core group of their audience remains wedded to traditional products and often resistant to getting news online.

For additional statistics on trends in consumption of traditional news media see:

Print Editions Decline

A steady decline in print circulation and a precipitous drop in advertising revenue in 2008 and 2009, especially classified advertising, have taken their toll on newspapers and newspaper chains.

Some have been forced out of business, such as the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post Intelligencer (at least its print operation – an online-only version continues) and the Ann Arbor News (which also will continue an online edition as well as a print product twice a week).

Others filed for bankruptcy reorganization, such as Tribune Company, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Newspapers company, the Chicago Sun Times, the Journal Register Co., American Community Newspapers, Freedom Communications, Heartland Publications, Creative Loafing and the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver. Others, such as Morris Publishing and Affiliated Media (the parent company of MediaNews Group), did bankruptcy reorganization filings prearranged with creditors.

Especially hard hit have been newspapers that were more purchased recently, such as the Tribune, Minneapolis and Philadelphia papers, and thus have owners with huge debt loads, or those in areas that still have competing daily papers, such as Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Seattle, Detroit and Tucson.

Newspapers have taken a variety of other measures to save money, preserve the print product, and try to weather the storm:

Layoffs and buyouts of employees (see the Paper Cuts map that details the staff reductions)

Instituting pay freezes and unpaid furloughs

Dropping contributions to 401-K plans and renegotiating salaries and pension payments with unions

Partnering with other newspapers to share coverage and content

Eliminating delivery of the newspaper to outlying areas

Consolidating or dropping sections of the daily paper

Discontinuing some features, such as stock listings

Reducing the number of pages in each edition

Shrinking the size of the paper

Eliminating editions entirely on days that attract the fewest advertisers and readers

Some papers are also changing the kind of coverage provided in the print product, focusing less on breaking news, which the Internet is much better suited to deliver, and more on analytical or contextual stories.

For example, compare the front page of the print edition of the Arizona Republic with the home page of azcentral.com, the Arizona Republic’s online site.

Arizona Republic Print Edition

Arizona Republic Online Edition

Both editions are from the same day, December 23, 2008.

The print edition contains longer feature stories, “sit-down” news to be perused, or articles about more leisurely activities.

The website is updated throughout the day with breaking news and shorter articles, and offers searchable services like events calendars, dining guides, etc. to cater to the different interests of an online audience.

Eliminating Print Editions

Some newspapers are going a step further and dropping the least profitable of their daily editions – usually Saturdays, Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

Examples of newspapers eliminating editions (see also this list compiled by AP)

The hope is that enough readers and thus advertisers will remain local to the print product that revenues will not decline substantially. But breaking the daily news reading habit threatens to further erode print audience loyalty and accelerate the existing decline in newspaper readership.

To ease the transition for older readers still wedded to the newspaper format, some newspapers also offer a digital edition online. This is an electronic version of the newspaper, which appears in a form similar to the print version and can be downloaded from the newspaper’s website.

But there is little evidence that such digital editions are very popular with readers, and critics say they are transplanting a print format into a medium that demands a very different product.

Ken Doctor, a long-time analyst and consultant on digital media, especially newspapers, has said:

“They are essentially counterintuitive products: older readers who may like the idea of ‘reading the paper’ in its traditional format don’t like reading online; younger readers who like reading online find it nonsensical to read yesterday’s news — and pay for it — when they can news of the moment free online.”

Source: In Desperation, Detroit Papers Flip the Switch, Content Bridges weblog

See also this Associated Press story about the experiences of the Detroit papers a year after they dropped home delivery of the printed paper on some days and launched an electronic edition. MinnPost also has a story and a chart about how successful e-editions have been for newspapers.

Some magazines, especially general interest publications, also are reducing their pages or cutting back on the number editions they publish. U.S. News & World Report went from being a weekly to a biweekly to a monthly in 2008. See this New York Times story about the changes weekly news magazines are undergoing.

National broadcast news networks similarly have considered paring back nightly news shows, which tumbled in popularity during the 1990s, largely due to the advent of cable news and then the Internet. See the New York Times story, Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable.

Local television stations have seen more recent declines in viewership and advertising revenues. See the Wall Street Journal story, Local TV Stations Face a Fuzzy Future.

Readings and Resources

For Newspapers, a Less than Daily Future – American Journalism Review, June/July 2012

Web First Publishing

Some newspapers and other news operations are now adopting a “web-first” or “web-centric” approach to organizing their work flow. This means having reporters and editors think first about reporting and producing text and multimedia stories for the web, then writing a text story for the print edition.

This also is sometimes referred to as “reverse publishing.”

It marks a major shift from the old “shovelware” approach of newspapers in the 1990s, in which stories were written first for the newspaper and then shoveled onto the web, often with few, if any, changes.

Then in the early 2000s “convergence” strategies started to gain traction at some media organizations, with newspapers, TV stations and radio stations partnering to produce content for a website. But producing stories for the traditional news or broadcast products usually still had top priority.

TBO.com, a partnership of the Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV Channel 8 launched in 2000, was one of the early examples of this move toward convergence (see Alan Mutter’s more recent analysis of how well this partnership performed).

In 2008, the Tampa Tribune moved toward a web-first approach.

“People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune. The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO,” Tribune Managing Editor Janet Coats said in July 2008.

In a web-first approach, the main focus often is on breaking news and getting those stories on the web as fast as possible, on a 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week news cycle.

Some publications have set up “continuous news desks” with dedicated staffs that produce round-the-clock breaking news for the web. The New York Times and Washington Post, for example, have continuous news desks (on the Times see “Talk to the Newsroom: Continuous News Correspondent“; on the Post see “Ask the Post“).

Other publications have emphasized getting all reporters and editors to focus on putting breaking news and other stories on the web, rather than having a separate staff handle story updates for the Internet edition.

In these cases, the publications usually must undergo major reorganizations of their newsrooms and try to train most or all of their editorial staff in writing for the web and producing multimedia.

Examples of newspapers and other media that adopted a web-first or multimedia strategy

Readings and Resources

Competition Online

News media companies that adopt a web-first strategy face a competitive environment very different from traditional print or broadcast environments.

Their major rivals for the attention of readers and viewers often are not other traditional news organizations, but non-profit organizations, private corporations, online-only startups or even government agencies that have turned to the web to get out their message. They often carve out niche markets on the Internet that compete with the websites of traditional news organizations.

Here are some examples of these websites:

craigslist

While newspapers were trying to figure out how to “up-sell” classified ads from their print product to their online editions, craigslist created a space where people could just post their classifieds free of charge (with the exception of employment ads and some real estate ads).

The site has a very simple design and very few features, but for the community it serves it’s highly functional. And its founder, Craig Newmark, puts a strong emphasis on customer service.

The result: craigslist decimated classified advertising in newspapers in many of the cities where it’s launched.

MaxPreps

While in the past newspapers were almost the only source of news about high school sports, online startups like MaxPreps now dominate that market online in many cities.

Founded in 2002 and later purchased by CBS in 2007, MaxPreps includes these features:

Databases of individual game-by-game player stats. The data also includes team rosters and game schedules for every sport in every high school in a town. Schools that participate in MaxPreps also can contribute photos, video, and other multimedia about the games.

Multimedia coverage of games, with video and photos shot by freelance photographers and videographers.

A coach’s corner where coaches can contribute content.

Video uploads by parents about their kid’s performance.

Professional Sports

Professional sports organizations have their own websites that provide a depth of coverage on teams, especially statistical data on players, that rivals or surpasses the information produced by newspapers or other local news organizations.

MLB.com, the official website for Major League Baseball, provides in-depth coverage of professional baseball teams that is as comprehensive as sports networks like ESPN. It includes audio and video feeds of games and deep databases on team and player stats.

The National Footbal League’s website has similar features. This is the NFL’s page on the St. Louis Rams football team.

As a result, local sports fans are by-passing newspapers or local TV stations to get information on their teams, and some newspapers are cutting back on their coverage of professional sports.

Concerned about the decline in print newspaper sports coverage of local teams, Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner Mark Cuban has proposed that professional sports organizations subsidize sports beat reporters at local newspapers.

NASA

When newspapers cut back their staffs, science reporters are often the first to go. NASA, meanwhile, has been expanding its website to directly reach people interested in astronomy. The site has photo galleries, video stories, a live NASA TV channel, interactive graphics and online games for kids.

Centers for Disease Control

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has a Social Media Tools web page that features widgets, podcasts, RSS feeds, social networks and mobile access to CDC information.

FBI

The FBI’s website features databases on crime, RSS feeds of “FBI stories” and “breaking news,” a multimedia section that features video, photos, podcasts and “FBI radio” shows, and widgets for embedding FBI content in blogs and websites.

Council on Foreign Relations

This public policy organization’s website has a multimedia section that features interactive graphics, photo slideshows, high-quality video, timelines and online quizzes. See especially CFR’s interactive multimedia piece Crisis Guide: Climate Change.

Greenpeace

The environmental activist organization has a website that features multimedia stories with video, photos and photo slideshows, staff blogs and a “news” section with stories about Greenpeace actions and environmental issues.

Traffic.com

The Traffic.com website has interactive maps that show driving conditions in cities around the country, traffic alerts, reports on traffic incidents and roadwork, and a drive-time calculator for determining how long it will take to drive between any two locations. Widgets called Traffic Magnets can be embedded on a blog or website to display local traffic conditions.

Web 2.0 and the Rise of Social Media

The concept of Web 2.0 surfaced in the wake of the dot.com crash of 2001 and discussions about what defined companies that were still prospering during the shake-out.

The term was first used in 2004 by Dale Dougherty in conversations with Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Publishing, John Battelle, author of the 2005 book The Search, people from MediaLive International that puts on trade shows, and others about planning a conference on the Internet. That led to the Web 2.0 Summit, an annual conference that began in Fall 2004.

In general Web 2.0 represented a shift away from software companies that tried to lock people into using their products and media companies that published static content for a passive audience, toward a digital culture of public participation, re-mixing by individuals of data and information, harnessing the power of collective intelligence and providing services, rather than products.

The rise of weblogs in the early 2000s was perhaps the best example of this emergence of “social media.”

For news organizations, Web 2.0 means moving away from using the Internet to draw a passive audience to a static publishing platform, and instead embracing the broader network, where communication, collaboration, interaction and user-created content are paramount.

Practically it means everything from engaging people on blogs, online forums and social networks, to promoting user generated content and providing more personalized content for mobile devices such as cellphones.

Many news organizations are now embracing the Web 2.0 approach. The Bivings Group, in a 2008 survey of the websites of the 100 largest newspapers, found that:

58 percent accepted user-generated photos

18 percent accepted user-generated videos

15 percent accepted user-generated articles

75 percent allowed for comments on articles (up from 33 percent in 2007)

76 percent provided some form of a “most popular” list of stories, based on what readers were commenting on or emailing or blogging about

92 percent allowed readers to tag stories for inclusion on social bookmarking or aggregation sites like delicious or Digg (compared with only 7 percent in 2006)

10 percent utilized social networking tools

Readings and Resources

Presentation Links

What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly

Comments on News Stories

One of the most basic ways that a news organization can engage people is to provide a way for them to comment on and discuss news stories on the website and postings to staff weblogs.

Newspapers and magazines have long allowed public comment in the form of letters to the editor. But online comments are as much about people communicating and interacting with each other, as they are just reacting to a reporter’s story.

They are a way of engaging people in a conversation about the news and recognizing that a story does not end with its publication, but rather is a starting point for generating commentary and contributions by the public.

But because online comments aren’t as strictly vetted as letters to the editor, they have proved vexing for many news organizations.

Only a very small percentage of readers usually will comment on any given news story or blog posting, and most comments will be made by a relative handful of frequent posters who may not be representative of general readership. This has been referred to as the 90-9-1 rule, which means 90 percent of people won’t post any comments, 9 percent will post infrequently, and 1 percent will account for the vast majority of the postings.

On the 90-9-1 rule, see Jakob Nielsen’s article on “Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute.”

One survey by AdAge found that 63% of readers said they were not more likely to visit a news site because it allowed posting of comments (although young adults were much more inclined to visit sites with commenting).

A few people also will post comments that are offensive or disruptive, quickly turning an intelligent discussion into an online food fight. In the blogging community, such posters are referred to as “trolls.”

Another major problem is spammers, who will bombard comments with messages that hawk products or promote online scams.

Because of the offensive postings, a number of news organizations have closed down comments – either temporarily or permanently – after the discussions degenerated into name calling or worse. The Washington Post, for example, shut down comments on its post.com blog in January 2006.

As Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, explained the decision:

“…there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being.”

For more on the Post’s decision, see the online chat with Brady.

News organizations also feel the nasty and offensive comments threaten their brands as reputable sources of news.

Some have argued that news organizations just need to swallow hard and live with offensive comments because the value of opening up to reader comments outweighs the downsides.

Others have adopted various schemes for trying to regulate and upgrade the conversations:

Human editors vet comments, either before they’re posted or afterward, and remove any that are deemed offensive or violate the publication’s guidelines for comment posting.

Readers are invited to report offensive comments to editors so they can be reviewed and removed.

Software solutions are adopted to filter comments, such as allowing readers to rank the value of comments and try to relegate offensive ones to the bottom. See SlashDot for one such system.

Tiered commenting systems are implemented, in which comments by people who have a track record of posting valuable comments appear first, while comments by everyone else appear on second tier below.

Requiring that people sign in using their social network identities such as Facebook in order to post comments. See the section of this tutorial on Facebook Connect.

The New York Times in 2013 began placing selected comments in the body of news stories at approprite points. This seemed to help elevate the overall quality of comments on the stories. And it gave more importance to reader feedback, integrating it into the story rather that exiling it to the end.

The Quartz news site in 2013 began placing comments adjacent to paragraphs in its stories, so comments are contextual rather than buried at the end of a story. The approach is modeled on how the site Medium places its comments, which it calls notes.

Readings and Resources

Online Forums

Besides commenting on individual stories, many news organizations provide online forums or discussion boards where people can start conversations and post comments. Forums allow more control by users because they can pick the topics they want to discuss, rather than just responding to a news story.

For example, check out the dozens of online forums the Cleveland Plain Dealer hosts on its cleveland.com site.

Online forums have proliferated at many other websites besides online publications. Boardtracker is a search engine for finding online forums by topic.

But online forums face many of the same problems as allowing comments on stories and blog entries – offensive postings by a relative handful of disruptive people and postings by spammers.

The problem of off-topic and offensive postings and spam is one that has plagued the Internet for years. One of the Internet’s original online forums – Usenet newsgroups – fell into relative disuse because of the volume of spam and “flame wars” on the newsgroups.

Chat Sessions

Another form of communicating with readers and soliciting comments is an online chat with reporters, editors or people in the news.

Chat has a long history on the Internet, dating to the introduction in 1988 of Internet Relay Chat. In 1991 IRC gained attention because people were using it to post notes and discuss the Persian Gulf War. For more on Internet Relay Chat, see the Internet Relay Chat help archive.

For news organizations and journalists, online chats improve transparency, allowing people to ask questions about how a story was reported or written and providing insight into how a news organization operates.

One good example is the Washington Post’s live chats section.

Blogs

The rise of weblogs in the early 2000s helped define the concept of Web 2.0.

Blogs are a reference to both a form of publishing content online and the software programs that make such publishing very easy for the average person.

Websites that later were referred to as the first weblogs surfaced in the mid 1990s. They often were short postings to static web pages of updates on particular topics by people interested in those subjects. One of the earliest by an individual was Dave Winer’s Scripting News.

In 1999 a company called Pyra, which was developing project management software, released a software program – Blogger – that made it simple to set up and constantly update a website. With Blogger a person didn’t need to know HTML coding to create a web page or to post content to it.

For the first several years, blogging was mostly done by people working in the technology sector or hobbyists in other fields. And their postings were usually very short and just informative.

The 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States brought to the fore two more aspects of blogging – the ability of people to post first-person accounts of news events and provide commentary on political issues. People who were eye-witnesses to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York City posted what they saw on their blogs. Other bloggers engaged in debate over how the U.S. should respond to the attacks. The term “warbloggers” was coined to describe them.

Blogging then took off and by 2002 several thousand weblogs were being launched every day, according to an estimate by David Sifry of Technorati, which tracks weblogs.

By 2008, the number of weblogs was estimated to be well over 100 million, according to Technorati (although many of these blogs are dormant).

But at least among teens blogging may now be in decline. While 28 percent of teens blogged in 2006, only 14 percent said they did so in 2009, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Younger people are gravitating instead to social networks like Facebook or Twitter (see this New York Times story).

Journalism and Blogging

News organizations initially were very reluctant to have their reporters or editors set up weblogs, and many viewed bloggers with suspicion or contempt. Bloggers were derided as “pajama-clad” amateurs writing late at night from the comfort of their bedrooms or basements, or “parasites” who did no original reporting and instead were just pundits feasting on the reporting labors of traditional media organizations.

But some news organizations embraced blogging early on, with blogs written by columnists, editors or reporters, often on technology beats. These early adopters of blogs included:

San Jose Mercury News, which had one of the earlierst blogs by a reporter, Dan Gillmor, who covered the technology beat

Christian Science Monitor, which sponsored a blog by Tim Regan, editor of the Monitor online

Spokane Spokesman Review, which had 10 blogs up and running by 2003

Dallas Morning News, which launched a group blog by its editorial board members

MSNBC.com, which hosted blogs by a half dozen of its popular commentators

InfoWorld, which had a group blog called Tech Watch to which any staff reporter could post

In Fall 2002 the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism launched a weblog – biPlog – to cover digital copyright and intellectual property issues.

As blogs gained widespread public adoption in the mid 2000s, more and more media companies embraced them. Columnists and reporters set up personal blogs, usually on their beats, and some news organizations began hosting blogs by members of the public or linking to popular blogs in their coverage areas.

The Spokane Spokesman Review hosts a number of staff written blogs and also has a directory to other bloggers in the Spokane area. The Lawrence Journal World has about 3 dozen staff blogs and also hosts weblogs by readers. Other papers are now following suit – see MediaShift’s story, Newspaper Try Again with Local Blog Networks.

Other papers began using blogs to report on breaking news stories – everything from political campaigns and elections to courtroom trials and natural disasters. See for example the Philadelphia Inquirer’s From the Source breaking news blog (and this story about the blog by Chris Krewson, the Inquirer’s executive editor of online news).

Despite the now widespread acceptance of blogging by news organizations, tensions remain over the role a journalist should play as a blogger and how news organizations should handle their staff produced blogs.

Most successful bloggers have their own voice or point of view. That’s fine for a columnist who starts blogging, but it can be at odds with the traditional media definition of the objective, impartial reporter.

Blog postings are usually not polished editorial products, like a heavily edited story, and a premium is put on doing frequent postings, especially on breaking news. The demands of individual blogging thus can clash with editing and fact-checking functions of news organizations.

News organizations have responded by adopting standards for postings by their in-house staff bloggers. Some publications require that blog posts be edited before being made public, while others allow a reporter to go public with a posting, and then have editors review the postings afterward.

Blogging is not for everyone. Some reporters take to it with enthusiasm, but forcing reluctant reporters to blog is usually a recipe for boring blogs and a demoralized staff.

For reporters who like blogging, it can be an invaluable form of personal branding – establishing themselves in an online community, connecting and engaging with the public, getting feedback and story ideas, and participating in the larger conversations going on all over the Internet.

Blogging Software

There are many software programs for easily setting up a weblog, either hosted on the blog software company’s website or on a web server at your news organization or at a private hosting service. Blogging software even can serve as a basic content management system for many publications.

Blogger, which helped touch off the blogging revolution, provides simple blogs hosted for free on its website.

Another popular site that provides a simple-to-set-up-and-use blogging service is Tumblr.

Two other popular and more versatile and sophisticated blogging programs are WordPress and Movable Type.

We use WordPress for our blogs at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. See our tutorial on Using WordPress.

If you pick one blogging program and decide later you’d prefer a different one, check out Google’s Blog Converters, which allow you to transfer your data, such as postings, from one blogging platform to another.

Readings and Resources

Top 10 blogging tips from around the web – Mark Luckie, 10,000 Words, 9/17/2008

Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults – Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2/3/2010

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter – New York Times, 2/20/2011

RSS – Syndicating Content

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is just that – a very easy way to distribute news content to people, rather than requiring them to visit a news website.

RSS software, created in 1999, lets a website set up a feed of its content such as news stories that people can download and read using an application called an RSS Reader.

The reader can be a software application a person installs on their computer, such as NetNewsWire for Mac computers and FeedDemon for Windows machines.

Or a person can sign up to use a reader hosted on a website, such as Google Reader or My Yahoo!.

RSS feeds also are a way to distribute your audio or video to mobile devices like the iPod or iPod Touch.

News organizations increasingly are offering RSS feeds of their news stories. For examples, see

Blogging applications such as WordPress and Movable Type also make it easy to provide RSS feeds of postings to a weblog. For journalists who have their own blogs, RSS is yet another way of extending their personal brand by providing a feed of stories they produce.

Aggregators – Selecting and Sharing Content

Some of the most popular news sites on the web are aggregators that pull together news stories produced by a wide variety of other news organizations.

The aggregators usually do a better job of packaging and presenting the stories than the original sites. And they take advantage of social media to extend their reach to people and dissseminate their content.

Social Media Aggregators

Some aggregators are citizen journalism based. So rather than having professional editors at news organizations determine the important stories of the day, people are taking on this role themselves at aggregation sites where users select and share what they deem the most important news or websites.

Users submit stories or websites to be listed on the aggregation sites, and other users then vote on or help rank the importance of the stories or sites and how prominently they should be displayed.

Examples of these social media aggregators include:

Reddit – a news stories aggregator that was purchased in 2006 by magazine publisher Conde Nast.

Mixx – Their motto: “So why should some faceless editor get to decide what’s important? But now you’re in charge. You find it; we’ll Mixx it.”

Delicious – people submit bookmarks of their favorite websites to share them with others. The bookmarks are arranged topically and are ranked by the most popular submissions. You also can find the personal bookmarks of the person who posted them.

Digg – a news stories aggregator, at which a vote for a story is called a “digg” (Digg was sold in 2012 and is being relaunched as a different service)

StumbleUpon – another site for sharing favorite websites.

Publish2 – this site is designed for news organizations that want their journalists to share links on news stories and have those links aggregated on the publication’s website.

Aggregators also have widgets people can use to embed story feeds on their blogs, websites or personal pages on social networks.

And news websites can place icons for the aggregation services at the end of stories, so readers can click on the icons to submit the stories for inclusion in the listings by the aggregators.

See for example, the CNN website. Click on a story there, scroll to the end and click on the Share button.

Aggregators also have developed applications for tablet computers or cellphones, such as Flipboard, Pulse, news360, Zite (owned by CNN) and Google Currents.

Computer Algorithm Aggregators

Other services like Google News rely on computer algorithms to aggregate links to news stories.

Professionally Edited Aggregators

Then there are human edited aggregators that employ professional journalists to curate content. Many of these sites also are increasingly employing journalists to produce original content. They include:

Huffington Post that publish articles that summarize and link to stories at other news publications. Huffington Post, which is owned by AOL, has been criticized by some journalists because traffic to a Huffington Post article often dwarfs traffic to the originally reported story being summarized. See also this video of Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong teaching journalism to a class at a Brooklyn middle school.

video of Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong BuzzFeed

Business Insider

Gawker

Newser (motto: “read less know more”)

News sites also often have blogs or other features that aggregate or curate links to stories published elsewhere.

Resources and Readings

News Organizations That Haven’t Learned To Share – Columbia Journalism Review, 5/7/2012

How 18-Year-Old Morgan Jones Told The World About The Aurora Shooting – BuzzFeed, 7/20/2012. How Reddit was used to post updates on the shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, CO, that killed a dozen people.

Facebook and Social Media

Beginning in the early 2000s, a new form of online social interaction emerged – social network websites.

Social networks provided people with a way to set up a personal page or profile to which they could post updates on what they were doing, while also keeping track of the activities of family, friends and colleagues.

People also can engage in group activities online and display feeds of information on their home pages – everything from personal photo slideshows and videos to musical playlists and calendars to weather reports and news stories. The applications that allow social network users to display this information on their profile pages are called widgets.

Some of the early social networks were Friendster, started in 2002, and Tribe, launched in 2003.

By 2008, 35 percent of adult Internet users had created a profile on a social network, quadruple the percentage in 2005, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey in December 2008. The numbers are even more striking for younger people – 75 percent of Internet users aged 18-24 have a social network profile.

By May 2013, 72 percentage of adult Internet users were using social networking sites like Facebook, up from 67 percent in late 2012 according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey. The number in 2005 was only 8 percent.

Journalists and Social Networks

For journalists and news organizations, social networks provide an opportunity for connecting with people, distributing news stories and complementing news coverage with feeds from social media.

Reporters can join the networks, converse with people and showcase their stories. It’s yet another way for reporters to develop personal brands for their work.

News organizations can create their own pages on social networks, such as a fan page on Facebook, and use that to alert people to important news stories the news organization has published or post other items of interest to its followers. Or they can set up their own social networks, using third-party software like Ning or their own homegrown platforms.

Social networks are great for generating conversations among people about stories. Many news media have found that the volume of reader comments on a story posted on Facebook can exceed comments posted on the news organization’s website.

News organizations can develop widgets that provide feeds of news stories that can be displayed on the personal pages of social network members. See for example the New York Times Widgets page that people can used to embed news feeds from the Times on their personal profile pages or on blogs or other websites.

News sites can use an application like Storify to pull together postings to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites on a particular topic in the news, especially a breaking news story.

News media can tell first-person stories using Facebook postings, such as the Washington Post’s A Facebook story: A mother’s joy and a family’s sorrow, which published a mother’s Facebook postings about giving birth and her subsequent medical complications. Read also this Poynter article describing why and how the Washington Post story was done.

Journalists also can use social networks like Facebook to find sources for stories. See for example Facebook’s Graph Search that can be used to locate people who work at particular companies or organizations, live in specific towns or cities or have particular interests. You also can create Interest Lists in Facebook to create a custom feed of postings by people around specific topics.

Social Networks as a Source of News

People are increasingly learning about news stories via social networks, but the percentage is still small.

About 47 percent of adult U.S. Facebook users “ever” get news on Facebook, according to a Pew Research Center survey in August-September 2013. Just 4 percent said Facebook was the most important way they got news.

Only 27 percent of American adults regularly or sometimes get news or news headlines through social networking sites, according to a report by the Pew Research Center released in September 2011. The number increased to 38 percent for people under 30.

During the 2012 presidential primary elections, only 20 percent of people regularly or sometimes got campaign information from Facebook and only 5 percent from Twitter, according to a Pew Research Center survey in February 2012.

A survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute found that nearly 63 percent of people surveyed said they prefer news stories produced by professional journalists, while less than 21 percent said they prefer to get most of their news from friends they trust.

But Facebook is more popular as a news source among younger people.

Among people 18 to 29 years old, 52 percent get news from Facebook, the top news source for the young, according to a USC Annenberg/Los Angeles Times poll in 2012. That compares with 25 percent of people overall who get news from Facebook.

Driving Traffic to News Sites

Social networks are driving an increasing percentage of the traffic to news sites, beginning to rival search engines like Google as sources of referrals to news stories.

Facebook reported that the average media site saw referral traffic from Facebook more than double in 2010.

News websites got 9 percent of their traffic from social media such as Facebook and Twitter in 2011, about a 57 percent increase over 2009, according to the State of the News Media 2012 report on digital news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

We saw this at the Oakland North community news site run by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism after we made a concerted effort in Spring 2010 to post story links on our site’s Facebook page. We saw the percentage of referrals to the Oakland North website from Facebook increase to 13.2 percent in December 2010, up from 5.5 percent in December 2009.

Some have even speculated that social networks will supplant news websites as the place where people get news.

One online news site, Rockville Central in Maryland, decided in early 2011 to stop publication of its website and instead publish entirely on a Facebook page. See The Hyperlocalist’s analysis of the move.

Making Effective Posts to Social Networks

News organizations also need to do more than just post links to stories on Facebook or services like Twitter.

Instead the postings need to be more informal and conversational, provide commentary or analysis on the news and invite people to participate, such as asking them to answer a question or provide suggestions for stories or story angles to pursue.

Adding a quality photo to a posting also signficantly increases reader responses, such as likes or comments. According to Liz Heron, who manages the team of social media editors at the Wall Street Journal:

Whenever possible, use images to tell a story. We often put photos and charts directly into tweets, and almost everything we post on Facebook has an image….Really putting a priority on being able to tell a story in a visual way has been one of the biggest shifts for us and the most important shifts in terms of growing our community. Source: Five social media tips from The Wall Street Journal – Journalism.co.uk, 2/4/2014

Stories that evoke emotions are more popular than straight news articles.

Based on studies of the kind of content people are most likely to share with others, stories that are fun or cute or made people happy are most effective, followed by stories that evoke anger or disgust. Least effective would be stories that provoke little emotion.

See this FastCompany article, These Scientists Studied Why Internet Stories Go Viral. You Won’t Believe What They Found, and this New Yorker story, The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, And Maybe Infuriate, You.

Postings need to be regular, but not overwhelming. So perhaps 5 – 10 posts a day.

There’s no optimum length, and both short or long posts can engage people depending on the subject matter. That said, in general 4-5 line posts seem to work best.

For the analyses behind these suggestions and more tips on effective postings, see Facebook’s “How Journalists Are Using Facebook Subscribe” and “Analysis: How News Pages Are Keeping Readers Engaged.”

When Journalists Should Post to Social Networks

An analysis by Dan Zarrella of posts of news story links to Facebook found that people tend to share articles more on weekends (especially Saturdays) than during weekdays, and in the mornings and evenings rather than mid day. This is the reverse of traffic patterns at most news web sites, which usually are busiest during weekdays and then experience a huge drop-off in traffic in the evening and on Saturdays and Sundays.

A Facebook analysis of news pages similarly found a “20% increase on Saturday and 9% increase in (reader) feedback on Sunday.” People were checking in throughout the day, with the most engagement in the mornings, according to the Facebook analysis.

A study by social marketing company Buddy Media of its clients Facebook postings found that Thursday and Friday postings by media companies produced the best engagement with readers. As for time of day, the Buddy Media study reported three peaks in Facebook user engagement – early morning (7 a.m.), right after work hours (5 pm) and late at night (11 p.m.).

We discovered the value of weekend posts at the Richmond Confidential community news site we run at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism when we posted a story and photo slideshow about a high school football game.The story was published on a Saturday and helped set a new one-day record for traffic to the site, much of it referred by Facebook users who linked to the football story.

So using social networks like Facebook to alert people to news articles on Saturdays and Sundays may increase weekend traffic at news websites.

Note: A study by Bitly, the URL shortening service, came up with different findings on the best times and days to post on Facebook. Bitly reported that links posted in the afternoon got the most click throughs on average, while links posted on weekends performed relatively poorly.

Facebook

The social network that emerged as the most popular in the late 2000s is Facebook

Founded in February 2004, Facebook started as a service for college students but then opened its doors to anyone to join.

By October 2013, Facebook reported having nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users. That compared to 800 million in December 2011.

The median age of a Facebook user also increased from 26 in May 2008 to 33 in October 2009, according to a Pew Internet and American Life survey.

By 2011, more than 42 percent of the U.S. population were Facebook users, according to an eMarketer survey.

By August-September 2013, 64 percent of U.S. adults were Facebook users, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Facebook Connect

In May 2008, Facebook launched Facebook Connect, which lets other websites utliize Facebook users’ profiles and networking features. A news website can have users register at the site using their Facebook accounts and then explore content on the site, comment on it or share links to it with their friends on the Facebook network.

Thus a news organization can integrate a social network into its website without having to create one itself and take advantage of the huge audience of an existing social network like Facebook.

See, for example, The Huffington Post’s Social News page at which people can login using their Facebook or other social media accounts. Huffington Post credits its use of Facebook with driving a significant part of the traffic to its site.

People who use social networks like being able to sign in to websites using their social network accounts like Facebook, according to one study, while they really dislike being forced to register using the site’s own signup process.

Having people use their Facebook profiles to register and then requiring such registration to post comments on stories may also cut down on the number of inapproprite comments people post. See the Poynter story about news organizations that have seen higher quality discussion by readers after switching to Facebook’s commenting system. And this Poynter article about more news outlets using Facebook Connect to help with comments.

If a person’s comments are traceable to their Facebook identity they may be more hesitant to make offensive remarks. And a very small percentage of people on Facebook use fake names, according to a study by Entrustet.

But also check this study by Disqus that concluded people with pseudonyms made higher quality comments than those using their Facebook identities.

For another implementation of Facebook Connect at a news site, see the News Mixer project developed by students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Also check out NewsCloud, an application media organizations like the Boston Globe and Baristanet are using to create community sites inside Facebook.

Other Facebook Features

In April 2010 Facebook also released “Like” buttons that news sites can add to stories so people can use their Facebook accounts to share stories they like with others on Facebook.

In March 2011 Facebook released an upgrade of its comments plug-in for websites, so a Facebook comments box can appear next to news stories on a publication’s website.

When a person posts a comment in the box, they also can have that comment appear in their news feed on Facebook. Publishers can moderate comments, such as deleting inappropriate ones posted in the Facebook comments box.

See this MediaShift story explaining the new features of Facebook comments. And read about TechCrunch’s experience using Facebook comments.

In September 2011 Facebook introduced “frictionless sharing,” in which people can automatically share on their Facebook pages the news stories they are reading.

News organizations also started developing “social reader apps” – Facebook applications people could install to read news stories while logged into Facebook.

The social reader apps deliver a feed of stories based in part on what your Facebook friends are reading, and stories you read are automatically shared with your friends. But by late 2012 the gloss appeared to be wearing off social reader apps, and several news organizations that developed them were dropping them.

In November 2011 Facebook unveiled the then-titled “subscribe” feature that allowed people to “Follow” postings to a news organization’s or a journalist’s facebook page without having to add them as a friend.

In March 2012 Facebook introduced interest lists to “help you turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper, with special sections—or feeds—for topics that matter to you.”

In July 2013 Facebook launched Embedded Posts, which makes it easy to embed on a news site a newsworthy post someone made to their Facebook page.

Facebook also has a media page on best practices for journalists in using Facebook.

Facebook Fading with Teens?

But are young people starting to feel ambivalent about Facebook?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a series of focus groups with teenagers around the U.S. in early 2013 and found the teens:

“…have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, disliking the increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful ‘drama,’ but they keep using it because participation is an important part of overall teenage socializing.”

This CNN story has Facebook’s response.

Other evidence that Facebook may be waning in importance for young people:

A study in the United Kingdom that found that “with 16-18 year olds in the UK…Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it,” according to one of the researchers. The reason? As more and more adults have joined Facebook, teens associate it with their parents, not their peers. See this Guardian story for more on the study.

This post by a 13-year-old to Mashable about why her peers are not using Facebook

A research paper by Princeton University graduate students that applied models on the ebb and flow of infectious diseases to Facebook and concluded there would be a rapid decline in use in the late 2010s (although the paper’s conclusions have been challenged, such as in this Slate article).

Other Social Networks

Among the major social networks are (in alphabetical order):

Google+



Google launched its own social network, Google+, in 2011 and by December 2012 had 500 million registered users.

Previously Google had operated Google Buzz, launched in February 2010, which automatically created a social network around Google’s Gmail service, using the person’s Gmail contact list. It was discontinued the following year, when Google+ debuted.

Instagram

Now owned by Facebook, Instagram is a cellphone application and social network for photo sharing that includes tools for applying simple filters to photos to alter their appearance. The Boston Globe used Instagram photos to help portray what it’s like to live in a Boston neighborhood.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network that targets professionals and promotes itself as a way to find business contacts and jobs. It launched in 2003 and as of 2008 claimed to have 30 million users.

MySpace

MySpace launched in 2003 and initially attracted a lot of young music lovers because of its MySpace Music feature. This let bands post their songs on the site, which other people then could add to their personal profile pages.

MySpace quickly evolved into a more general interest social network, mainly for young people. It was purchased by News Corp. in 2005 and by 2006 claimed to have more than 100 million users. But it then fell way behind Facebook as the most popular social network.

Ning

Ning is a website founded in 2004 that allows easy creation of a social network, hosted on Ning’s site for free. Some news organizations have used Ning to create social networks for the communities they serve.

Ning announced in April 2010 that it would be charging for its service. Non-educational organizations that had set up Ning social networks also would have to pay to continue them or move the content to some other service.

Pinterest

Launched in 2011, Pinterest has virtual pinboards to which people “pin” photos including images from websites they like and want to link to. You also can follow what someone else is pinning, and integrate your pins into your Facebook page or Twitter postings.

The Wall Street Journal makes extensive use of Pinterest, with 38 different boards on topics like food & drink, fashion, design & decorating, real estate, cars and the Journal’s trademark “hedcut” dot-ink illustrations.

The Pottstown Mercury newspaper in Pennsylvania uses Pinterest to publish a Wanted by Police mugshots gallery.

In September 2013 Pinterest added the ability for people to pin news articles, a response to increasing use of Pinterest by journalists.

There is some data indicating that Pinterest is one of the leading social networks for referring people to news stories. See the Mashable story: “Pinterest Drives More Traffic to Publishers Than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit Combined.”

For good overviews of the site and how news organizations are using Pinterest see:

SnapChat

A service particularly popular among teens, SnapChat lets you snap a photo or record a short video on a cellphone, add a caption and upload it for viewing by your friends. But the experience is ephemeral – the file disappears after a short time (how long is set by the user).

Vine

A cellphone application, Vine lets you quickly shoot a video of up to 6 seconds and then share it with friends. Vine was purchased by Twitter in lae 2012.

YouTube

The video sharing site launched in 2005 and then purchased by Google, YouTube was exceeding 4 billion views of its videos per day and 1 billion unique visitors each month by 2012.

Social Networks at News Organization Sites

Here are some news sites that have set up their own social networks:

Bakersfield Californian – Bakotopia

The Bakersfield Californian newspaper developed a home-grown social networking application – Bakotopia – that people use to create their own profiles and personal pages. Bakotopia started in 2005 as a preemptive move against craigslist by providing an online classified ad service. As it evolved other features were added, including social networking.

Denver Post/Denver Newspaper Agency – YourHub

YourHub is a series of local online communities developed by the Denver Newspaper Agency, in which people can create profiles and blogs, and post their events, personal stories and photos.

New York Times – Times People

At the Times People page you create a profile and “share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, reader comments, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels.”

Social Media Tools and Services

Storyful

Storyful scours social media postings, uses human editors to evaluate the validity of the postings and then aggregates them into topical news feeds.

RebelMouse

RebelMouse takes postings you’ve made to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media and puts them together on a personal page or pages. You also can embed the RebelMouse page on another website, such as a blog.

News organizations also are using RebelMouse to aggregate social media postings by members of the public on particular topics or breaking news stories.

See How newsrooms are using social media curator RebelMouse – International Journalists’ Network, 10/13/2013.

Branch

Use Branch to post a reference to something you read on the web or an idea you have, share it with people via email or Twitter to start a conversation about it, and then post the conversation (the branch) on your blog or share it as a link.

Pluck

Pluck provides a suite of tools for websites that want to create social networks, as well as blogs, forums and comments.

Resources and Readings

Presentation Links

Twitter

When Twitter was publicly released in August 2006 there were plenty of skeptics. The idea was to give people an easy way to post very short – 140 characters or less – notes about what they were doing in their daily lives. Postings from people saying they were about to go to lunch or board a plane seemed trivial.

People can set up accounts on Twitter for free and then post the short messages (called “tweets”) that appear on their personal pages on the Twitter website. The notes can be posted at the Twitter website or from cellphones and other mobile devices.

Others then can check a person’s postings by subscribing to them (referred to as “following” a person) on the Twitter website. The notes can be viewed on the website or on a cellphone or other mobile device. They also can be embedded in a personal blog or website.

Twitter’s Growth

Despite early reservations about the usefulness of Twitter, the service took off, launching what has been referred to as the “microblogging” phenomenon. Twitter had 7 million visitors to its website in February 2009, a 1,382 percent increase over a year earlier, according to Nielsen Online. By March 2009, Twitter was growing at a 2,565 percent annual rate, according to Nielsen Online data.

Twitter’s growth appeared to slow in late 2009, according to some studies, and a relatively small percentage of Twitter users actively post (see the studies cited in the Readings and Resources section below).

In May 2013, 18 percent of adult American Internet users were Twitter users, according to a Pew Internet & American Life survey. That’s up from 15 percent in February 2012, 13 percent in May 2011 and 8 percent in November 2010.

A survey by the Pew Research Center in August-September 2013 reported that 16 percent of U.S. adults were Twitter users (people polled in this survey included non-Internet users, which probably accounts for the slightly smaller percentage of Twitter users than the May 2013 survey above).

The number of people using Twitter to get news remains small. During the 2012 presidential primary elections, only 5 percent of people regularly or sometimes got campaign information from Twitter, according to a Pew Research Center survey in February 2012. A year later still only 8 percent of of people were using Twitter for news, according to an August-September 2013 Pew Research survey.

People using Twitter to Report News Events

People often use Twitter to report on news events they witness or participate in:

Demographics of Twitter Users

When Twitter first began to take off in the late 2000s, its main demographic was not teenagers or young kids, but somewhat older professionals in metropolitan areas, according to surveys at the time.

See the 2009 story “Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet” in Mashable, and the 2009 analysis of Twitter usage data at TechCrunch: “Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.” Watch this Current TV video on Twouble with Twitters on the Twitter generation gap.

A Nielsen Online study in February 2009 reported that the largest age group using Twitter was 35 – 49 years old.

Only 22 percent of 18-24 year olds used Twitter, according to a Participatory Marketing Network study in 2009. A Pew Internet and American Life survey released in October 2009 put the median age of a Twitter user at 31, compared with 26 for MySpace and 33 for Facebook (up from 26 for Facebook in May 2008).

But more recent Pew surveys found that young adults were significantly more likely to use Twitter than older people. Internet users 18 to 24 year old were the fastest growing group of Twitter users, according to a February 2012 Pew survey.

One survey of teens in 2013 reported that Twitter was more important to them than Facebook (although this was primarily because of declining popularity for Facebook among teens, according to the survey data).

Another Pew survey in August-September 2013 found that Twitter uses were younger, more mobile and more educated than Facebook users.

Urban Internet users also are twice as likely as rural residents to use Twitter, according to a Pew Internet & American Life survey in December 2010.

African American adults who use the Internet are more likely to use Twitter (28 percent) than white Internet users (12 percent), according to Pew Internet & American Life survey released in May 2012. The number for Hispanics was 14 percent.

A similar trend was found among African-American teens who are internet users: 39 percent of African-American teens use Twitter, compared with 23 percent of while teens, according to a Pew Internet & American Life report in 2013.

News Organizations Twittering

News organizations soon picked up on Twitter, using it to post quick updates on breaking news stories or just provide a more general feed of links to news stories.

See this list of news organizations using Twitter compiled in February 2008, and another list that’s more up to date. One example is the New York Times feed on Twitter of links to its news stories. Also read the postings by Knight Digital Media Center journalism fellows about how their news organizations are using Twitter.

Twitter can be particularly effective on breaking news stories, according to surveys (see, for example, NPR’s survey of its Twitter followers).

Twitter feeds on breaking news can be a mix of postings by reporters and by citizen eye-witnesses:

In August 2010 Twitter also released a Tweet button that a news website can place next to a news story to make it easier for people to do a Twitter post about the story.

In April 2013 Twitter released its Web Intents feature, which a news organization can use to highlighted a phrase or sentence in a story, so a reader can click on it and send it out to his/her Twitter feed. When someone then clicks on the item in the Twitter feed, they’re taken to the part of the story where the excerpt appeared.

The New York Times used this to highlight quotes for tweeting in an August 2013 article with interviews with cast members of Saturday Night Live.

Making Effective Tweets

Here are some tips for journalists on how to effectively use Twitter to engage people:

Tweet about breaking news rather than feature stories (this takes advantage of how most people use Twitter: “a core function of Twitter is passing along pieces of information as (a breaking news) story develops,” according to a Pew Research Center survey of Twitter users.

Have your individual reporters tweet rather than sending tweets from your news organization’s centralized Twitter account. Readers tend to respond better to personal rather than corporate postings.

Tweet not just about stories on which you’re working but also about other things you come across on your beat, and include URLs

Try to use more action verbs in a tweet, rather than just nouns

Being clear is better than being clever in a tweet

Include a #hashtag in your tweet to increase the number of people who see your tweet. The hashtag in effect allows you to join a larger topical conversation that’s using the hashtag or to create a new conversation that invites others to join in by using the same hashtag.

Include a photo.

Use Twitter to interact with people by asking for sources on a story or offering to answer their questions about a story

The best times for getting people to re-tweet your tweets are during the early afternoon and then very late afternoon and possibly on weekends (the data on best times and days to tweet is conflicting ).

For more tips on how to compose an effective “tweet,” see Dan Zarrella’s How to Get More Clicks on Twitter, this Poynter story on a Twitter study and this Mashable story on a study on how marketers can best use Twitter.

While journalists have embraced Twitter probably more than any other social network, news sites get far more referrals from Facebook and even Instagram.

So journalists are to some degree out of synch with the public on the social media platforms of choice. See this Washington Post story by Ezra Klein on Why do journalists prefer Twitter to Facebook?

App.net

In 2012 a paid alternative to Twitter was launched – App.net. The rationale for App.net is that advertising supported social networks (like Twitter) will require features that are at odds with what users need, whereas a pay-to-use network will cater better to what users want.

Readings and Resources

Presentation Links

Widgets

A widget is a bit of code that can be embedded on a website, blog or a personal page on a social network to display all different types of content drawn from other websites, including a feed of news stories.

Widgets can be used to display everything from weather, traffic and stock reports to event calendars and personalized maps.

Many news organizations developed widgets to provide feeds of their news stories and other content that can be embedded on other websites and social networks.

One simple example is National Geographic’s “Photo of the Day” widget for Facebook.

Here’s the widget the Windy Citizen news site in Chicago provides for adding their news feed to a social network or blog (scroll down to the section on “Add today’s top stories to your site”).

For more information on how widgets work, see the wikipedia entry for Web Widgets.

See also our tutorial on Creating a Publication Widget.

Readings and Resources

itduzzit.com – provides a drag and drop editor that allows non-programmers to create simple applications and widgets drawing on APIs.

API

API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, is a way a website or service can allow integration of its content into other websites. The API allows a computer system to interpret and use data created on another system, even if it used a different programming language or structure.

A good example is the Google Maps API, which Google released so other websites could embed customized Google maps on their pages.

Programmers are needed to create an API, and APIs often have to be customized for different types of websites that want to utilize them, such as different social networks.

See Google’s OpenSocial project that is developing common API’s that can be implemented within a variety of proprietary web services.

News organizations can develop APIs so their content can be customized and mashed up with additional information at other web sites. It’s one more way for a news organization to participate in and make its content available to a larger online network.

See for example:

NPR’s API which it released publicly so other web sites could develop customized feeds of podcasts of NPR radio shows.

The New York Times released an API in October 2008 for databases of federal campaign finance reports it had developed, so other sites could access the data and reuse it in different forms. The Times also relased an API for data on members of Congress and their voting records.

In February 2009 the New York Times followed up with a release of an API for 28 years of its own articles, tagged for efficient searching.

The BBC has released a half dozen APIs of its content.

The Guardian has an “Open Platform” initiative that makes its news stories, including video and photos, as well as data and statistics vetted by Guardian editors, available via an API.

Readings and Resources

itduzzit.com – provides a drag and drop editor that allows non-programmers to create simple applications and widgets drawing on APIs.

User Generated Content and Crowdsourcing

Blogs, mobile devices, social networks, microblogging and other digital tools have allowed people to publish their own stories and cover their own communities.

YouTube, which was purchased by Google, is a wildly popular site where people can post videos. It’s motto is “Broadcast Yourself.”

Flickr is a site owned by Yahoo! where people can upload and share photos.

This proliferation of user generated content (UGC) represents yet another challenge and opportunity for news organizations.

Citizens can bypass mainstream media entirely and produce content and communicate directly with others. Many journalists have decried this rise in “citizen journalism” as the triumph of amateurism over professionalism.

It also can lead to inaccuracies or worse in citizen reporting, such as when members of the Reddit social media new site claimed they had identified suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing case in April 2013, but the men were completely innocent. Reddit apologized and, in fairness, professional media also made egregious mistakes in reporting.

Many news organizations are inviting citizens to co-produce the news and contribute to the news organizations’ websites, a practice referred to as crowdsourcing.

The Bivings Group, in a 2008 survey of the websites of the 100 largest newspapers, found that:

58 percent accepted user-generated photos

18 percent accepted user-generated videos

15 percent accepted user-generated articles

Examples of user generated content or crowdsourcing at news organizations include:

Bakersfield Voice – an online edition of the Bakersfield Californian produced by citizens. This began with the Northwest Voice covering a section of Bakersfield that was produced both online and in print.

iReport – a special section of CNN’s website where people can post their own news stories, including video or photos.

MP Expenses – a project by The Guardian in which people were asked to analyze hundreds of thousands of pages of expense reports of members of Parliament.

Free the Files – A project by ProPublica asking people to analyze filings by television stations about political advertisements to create a database of campaign ad spending. Nearly 1,000 people participated in the project and $1 billion in advertising purchases was logged into a public database. ProPublica used a variety of techniques to get people motivated to participate in the project, including keeping the tasks simple, running contests, providing constant feedback on what a person had accomplished, and using a clean page design with few distrations so people woud stay focused on the tasks.

CicadaTracker– Public radio’s WNYC and Radiolab got people to put out homemade sensors in 2013 to try to track the reemergence of the Cicada insects during their 17-year cycle.

See this list of local community news sites and services that draw on citizen journalism, some created by news organizations. some by online start-ups, and others entirely by citizens.

Readings and Resources

Wikis

Perhaps the ultimate form of user generated content is the wiki.

Wiki software was developed to promote collaboration in producing content, relying on the collective wisdom of the masses rather than the specialized knowledge of a limited group of experts.

It became hugely popular with the creation of the expansive wikipedia online encyclopedia, which now dwarfs traditional encyclopedias like Britannica in the amount of content it contains. Whether wikipedia is more credible than Britannica remains a subject of continuing analysis and debate. See the Guardian’s research study, “Can You Trust Wikipedia,” and a study by Nature magazine.

News organization experiments with wikis have been very tentative thus far. Part of the reason was the disastrous experience the Los Angeles Times had when it set up a wiki in 2005 to collectively write editorials. The wiki was inundated with obscene photos and other inappropriate content and shut down.

Other news media sponsored wikis include:

Forbes magazine set up a wiki to get people to create organization charts on companies. But little content has been contributed to the wiki.

The Toronto Globe and Mail is experimenting with using a wiki to get people to contribute their ideas about public policy issues in Canada, such as the federal budget.

Mobile – Cellphones

The explosion in cellphone usage during the 1990s and 2000s poses a major challenge and huge opportunity for media companies to get their content distributed to mobile devices.

While home computer ownership has pretty much plateaued in recent years (approximately three quarters of U.S. households have a computer), cellphone ownership is even higher – 82 percent, according to a survey released in September 2010 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The percentage of American adults with an Internet-enabled smartphone also has been increasing – up to 56 percent in 2013, according to a Pew Internet & American Life survey.

Cellphone usage also tends to be habitual, with people checking their cellphones continuously during the day and evening.

Cellphone ownership among African Americans and English-speaking Latinos is higher (87 percent for both groups) than among whites (80 percent), according to a survey released in July 2010 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Similarly smartphone ownership is higher for African American adults (64 percent) and Hispanic adults (60 percent) that for white adults (53 percent), according to a Pew Internet & American Life survey. in 2013.

Cellphones and News Sites

A steadily increasing percentage of people regularly get news on their cellphones, according to surveys.

In 2010 only 10 percent of cellphone owners in the United States said they regularly got news or news headlines on their cell phones and 8 percent sometimes did, according to a Pew Research Center survey released in September 2010.

In 2012 41 percent of men and 30 percent of women were getting news daily on their cellphones, according to a Pew Research Center survey released in December 2012.

In 2011 51 percent of smartphone owners got news on the devices (compared to 70 percent of laptop/desktop computer owners), according to a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

A 2012 national survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute of users of mobile devices, both cellphones and tablets, reported that 63 percent used one or more of the devices to consume news in the previous 7 days.

And news organizations are reporting an increasing percentage of traffic to their websites comes from mobile devices. The New York Times reported in November 2012 that of combined visits to the Times’ website, mobile website and apps, 37 percent came from cellphones or tablets.

Websites developed by news organizations for traditional web browsers often display poorly on mobile devices, requiring new strategies for delivering stories and other content to cellphone users:

Media companies create mobile versions of their websites that are compatible with small cellphone screens. Check out the mobile websites of the New York Times or CNN and Consumer Reports.

Some sites use “responsive design” in coding their web sites: the site resizes itself based on the screen size or resolution of standard mobile devices. See the Boston Globe’s responsive design website (click on a corner of your web browser and drag to shrink the page and see the responsive design in action).

Other sites deliver news stories to cellphones using applications developed specficially for mobile devices. custom applications for mobile devices. See, for example, the New York Times, which has custom apps for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry cellphones.

Some news organizations just provide news feeds for mobile devices that deliver stories via text messages. See for example ESPN’s text message alerts service. Companies such as foneshow work with media companies to deliver audio feeds of news stories to cellphones, which can be heard on older, less sophisticated devices.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen reported that his tests of user experiences found that mobile versions of websites should be created because their usability is significantly better on cellphones. On the question of whether to create a mobile website or a separate mobile apps, Nielsen concluded that while apps currently have the upper hand, in the future it will be mobile websites.

A survey of cellphone users by Yahoo and Ipsos reported that people prefer apps for acquiring information, but prefer mobile browsers for searching for information.

A Reynolds Journalism Institute survey of mobile device users (both cellphones and tablets) found that 54 percent prefer reading news on a news organization’s website, compared with 22 percent who prefer a news organization’s application.

Among only smartphone users, news organization websites again were preferred over news applications, according to the RJI survey. Android users preferred news websites over news apps 63 percent to 23 percent, while iPhone users preferred news websites 49 percent to 34 percent.

Cellphones equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) technology provide another opportunity for news organizations to deliver stories and information to people based on their location. Thus feeds of information like restaurant reviews or stories on traffic problems could be tailored to where a person is at any given moment.

Smartphone users are more likely to access local information like maps, event locations and local services than owners of tablet devices, according to a survey by Keynote.

iPhones

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in June 2007 improved the web browsing experience on a cellphone.

With the introduction of the 3G version of the iPhone with GPS technology in July 2008, information could be delivered to an iPhone based on the user’s location. See for example Apple’s description of how to use the iPhone to get maps with GPS.

While the iPhone display and touch screen technology made web browsing easier, it still proved unsatisfying for many users.

iPhone Applications

So content companies developed applications custom tailored for the iPhone to improve usability. For news organizations, these usually mean apps that deliver feeds of news stories.

See for example the iPhone applications for:

ABC News

Indianapolis Star Tribune. This app delivers not just the usual feed of headlines of stories, but also a photo gallery from the Star Tribune; a quick and easy way to take a photo and upload a photo to the Star Tribune’s site; a map of local road conditions and a news and events feed customized to your location.

New York Times. Besides the iPhone, the New York Times has apps for Android and Blackberry phones.

iPods and Podcasts

Another Apple device that has exploded in popularity is the iPod. While this portable device is primarily used for downloading music, news organizations also are providing audio podcasts of news stories that can be downloaded onto an iPod or iPhone.

See for example NPR’s directory of podcasts.

Android

Google created the Android operating system for cellphones that has quickly become a major competitor for the iPhone. “Droid” software is used by a variety of cellphone manufacturers.

Android Applications

News organizations also designed custom applications to deliver news stories to droid cellphones.

Google has created an App Inventor software program that allows people without any programming skills to design their own Android applications.

Cellphones and Social Media

People who use mobile devices are only very slightly more likely than laptop/desktop users to access news based on recommendations from social media like Facebook or Twitter, according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

But people who use both cellphones and tablets to get news rely more on social networks for recommendations on news than laptop/desktop news consumers.

The survey found that 67 percent of people who get news on mobile devices follow news recommendations from Facebook, compared to 41 percent of laptop/desktop users. Similarly, 39 percent of mobile device users follow news recommendations from Twitter, compared to 9 percent of laptop/desktop users.

Cellphones and User Generated Content

The flip side of delivering news to cellphone users is their ability to use photo and video cameras built into many of the devices to create and publish their own content, especially eye-witness accounts of news events. A classic case was the execution of Sadam Hussein captured on a cellphone video camera.

News organizations can take advantage of this by encouraging people to submit their cellphone photos and videos. The Indianapolis Star Tribune iPhone application includes a simple button to take a photo and/or upload a photo to the Star Tribune’s site.

Cellphones as Multimedia Reporting Tools

Many reporters are using cellphones, especially the iPhone, to take photographs and record video and audio for stories.

See this video of a man being hit and kicked by a security guard that was recorded on an iPhone by a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalsm student while working as an intern at a paper in Iceland. The video had 50,000 views within 48 hours.

The iPhone now records HD quality video that can rival the quality of video shot on consumer and even lower-end profesional grade video cameras.

Many accessories and applications also are available to do everything from improving the quality of recorded audio to letting you edit video on the phone.

Read The Essential Mobile Journalism Field Kit posting by Richard Koci Hernandez, co-instructor in a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism class that wrote a “Mobile Reporting Field Guide” iBook on accessories and applications for the iPhone.

See also this 10,000 Words story about an earlier UC Berkeley Journalism School class taught by Jeremy Rue on using the iPhone as a multimedia reporting device that includes tips on how to use cellphones for multimedia.

Cellphone Applications

Cellphone applications have become popular because they usually provide a better experience than using a cellphone browser.

About 43 percent of cellphone users have downloaded apps onto their phones, according to a survey released in September 2010 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But only 68 percent of those people actually have used the applications, and apps rank low among the cellphone features people prefer to use.

Use of cellphone applications also usually tapers off dramatically in days or weeks.

Still, news, sports score and weather apps score relatively high in continued use after 90 days compared with other types of apps (such as music or entertainment), and to a lesser degree in frequency of usage, according to a 2012 study by Flurry, an application advertising and analysis company.

Many companies are developing applications for the iPhone and other cellphones that provide geo-locational information and take advantage of social media.

They’re often providing the kinds of information such as events listings, restaurant reviews, store coupons, home sales or reports on problems in a community that used to be the domain of local newspapers. They include:

* Location-Based Social Media – Companies like Foursquare, brightkite, loopt and MyTown have cellphone apps people can use to tell their friends where they are or submit comments on restaurants, nightclubs or other places to hang out.

See Foursquare’s partnerships with Canada’s Metro newspaper and the New York Times and how the Wall Street Journal is using Foursquare’s tips and check-ins features to feed entertainment and news stories to locations Foursquare users are visiting. Read about how the Washington Post and National Geographic created tour-guide-like trips for Gowalla.

Nieman Reports has a summary of a research study on what has worked for news organizations using Foursquare.

(for a different take on Foursquare and similar social media see the Onion’s “New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It“)

* Photo Sharing – Instagram is a cellphone application and social network for photo sharing that includes tools for applying simple filters to photos to alter their appearance. It’s now owned by Facebook.

* Reporting Community Problems – SeeClickFix has an app people can use to report public nuisances and problems that need fixing in their communities – everything from potholes and broken traffic lights to graffiti and trash.

News organizations such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald and the Dallas Morning News have partnered with SeeClickFix to use its widget to display maps of problems in those cities on the newspapers’ websites. See this New York Times story on how the Journal Inquirer in Connecticut is using SeeClickFix. And check out how the Mission Local site embeds the SeeClickFix widget on its home page (scroll down and look in the middle column).

* Restaurant and Business Reviews – Yelp provides user-submitted reviews of restaurants and businesses via its cellphone app.

* City Guides and Tours – News and other organizations have created cellphone applications that are guides and tours of various cities.

Check out the New York Times’ “The Scoop” guide to New York City (Mashable has more on the application)

You can make simple iPhone applications like local guides using free services like Sutro Media. You just enter content into a template and Sutro Media generates a custom iPhone application (you set a price for the application and split the revenue with Sutro Media).

See for example this Mission Bars guide developed by two students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and this tour of historic spots in Richmond, CA, also created by UC Berkeley journalism students, both done in collaboration with Sutro Media.

* Augmented Reality – Companies like Layar developed augmented reality or “AR” applications: a person points a cellphone at a location and information about the location is overlaid on the phone’s camera display. The location is determined by the GPS location of the cellphone, the cellphone’s internal compass or software that recognizes the shape of an object seen through the cellphone’s camera.

See the Museum of London app that overlays historic photos on London landmarks. Yelp also has an augmented reality application for mobile viewing of its business reviews. And read about how the Boston Globe quickly and inexpensively developed an AR application to display animated versions of artwork on display at art events.

However, Layar has found it’s difficult to get people to consistently use its AR application, so the popularity of AR applications remains a question mark.

* Real Estate Sales – Zillow has an iPhone app that displays information about nearby houses and homes for sale based on your location.

* Coupons and Group Discounts – A number of companies like Groupon, Yowza and LivingSocial have cellphone apps that provide access to discount coupons at stores or group discount offers. The coupons also can be accessed at the companies’ websites.

Read about how 3,000 people signed up for a Groupon half price offer on cupcakes at a bakery in San Francisco and how other businesses have been overwhelmed by customers after using Groupon. But another study by a Rice University found some businesses were less satisfied with the customers they got using Groupon. See also this New York Times story that raises questions about the viability of these discount coupon services.

See Poynter Online’s Rick Edmonds’ analysis of the opportunty and threat Groupon poses for newspapers.

See also the Nieman Journalism Lab story on how news organizations can use discount coupons or gift certificates to become “deal brokers” between local businesses and residents. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has launched one such coupon service called STeal.

* Barcodes – With RedLaser you use your phone to scan a barcode on a product (often displayed as a two-dimensional QR or “quick response” code) at a store to find sites online that offer the same product often at a cheaper price. ShopSavvy displays product prices at online sites and at other local stores.

* Street Vendors – the Taco Loco iPhone app provides a map so people can locate nearby taco trucks and stands. People also can update the map with the latest location of the vendors and rate the quality of the tacos.

Readings and Resources

Presentation Links

Wearable Devices

The next generation of mobile devices will be wearable – from eye glasses to wrist watches to…

Eye Glasses

In 2012 Google introduced Google Glass, a pair of eye glasses that you can use to retrieve and display information and perform various electronic tasks like sending emails or sharing photos.

Tasks are performed using voice commands or by tapping or swiping with you finger a tiny sensor on the side of the glasses.

You can use Google Glass to do a Google search, send an email, get directions, take a photograph, record a video, and access Facebook and Twitter

Smart Watches

Several smart watches were introduced in 2013, and many more are in development. They alert you to incoming emails, texts or calls to your cellphone. You can read messages on the watch screens or answer voice calls.

You also can add health and fitness apps to monitor you exercise routines.

Some of the watches under development include photo and video cameras.

The smart watches include:

Samsung Galaxy Gear

Pebble

Omate TrueSmart – under development

Neptune Pine – under development

Kapture – under development. Kapture is an audio recording device worn on the wrist

iWatch – this is a smart watch that Apple is rumored to be developing. Rumors about the watch started circulating in December 2012. A main feature of the watch may be integration with health and fitness applications, according to some news reports.

Readings and Resources

Sensors, Drones and the Internet of Things

Sensors and other devices that collect data and other information and transmit it via the Internet are proliferating. This has been referred to as “The Internet of Things” or “ubiquitous computing.”

Predictions about how sensors would transform how we live and work have been around for a long time. But the proliferation of smart phones that can communicate with sensing devices has increased interest in the area.

The home is one place where sensors connected to smart phones are being deployed to measure, track or automate everything from heating and lighting to when doors should be unlocked. See for example how a company called Smart Things connects together devices in a home, which then can be manipulated using a smartphone.

Another major area of sensor deployment is measuring environmental hazards like air pollution.

See for example the Air Quality Egg project, which allows people to deploy air-quality sensors to gather air quality information that then is uploaded to the Internet. An earlier, similar project was called Common Sense.

And UC Berkeley Professor of Art Practice Greg Niemeyer used air-quality sensors in a game called Black Cloud that high school students played to track down the sources of air pollution in their community.

Using sensors to obtain this kind of information opens new possibilities for data driven news stories.

WNYC in New York in 2013, for example, had people build DIY Cicada Tracker temperature sensors. People would stick the sensors in the ground and track rising temperatures that would predict the arrival of Cicada bugs that emerge from underground every 17 years.

Drones

Another type of device being deployed for news gathering is the drone. Also referred to as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs, drones can be used to get videos, photos and other information for news stories such as natural disasters or public protests.

Journalism schools at the University of Nebraska and the University of Missouri set up drone labs or programs to explore their use in reporting.

But those programs hit a major roadblock in August 2013 when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration notified them they required Certificates of Authorization to use the drones. The FAA now is drafting regulations on how drones deployed for commercial purposes can use U.S. airspace.

Other countries allow regulated use of drones, and some news organizations have experimented with using them for newss coverage, such as the BBC with its Hexacopter.

But there are a number of issues that are likely to restrict their use for news gathering. These range from public safety and privacy concerns to limited flight time due to short battery life.

Readings and Resources

Tablets

While cellphones have become ubiquitous as mobile devices, it’s been a much longer road to popularity for tablet computers – portable electronic devices that try to fill a void between tiny screen cellphones and more cumbersome laptops.

Roger Fidler was one of the original proponents of these portable “electronic tablets” when he ran the Knight Ridder Information Design Lab in the early 1990s. See this story and this 1994 video showing Fidler’s vision (Fidler is now at the Reynolds Journalism Institute as Program Director for Digital Publishing).

Many companies subsequently produced various forms of tablet computers as reading devices, such as the SoftBook and the Rocket eBook in the late 1990s and Sony’s e-book readers in the mid to late 2000s. But most of the devices failed to gain much traction with consumers.

Other companies in the 1990s also worked on developing “electronic paper” or “e-ink” technology that would be used in wafer-thin flexible displays that theoretically could be rolled up and put in a briefcase, backpack or purse. But years passed with no consumer product hitting store shelves.

Then with Amazon’s release of the popular Kindle e-book reader in late 2007, buzz about portable tablet computers heated up again.

By 2010 and 2011 a number of sophisticated tablet computers were being produced, usually with color displays and/or wireless Internet connections for downloading up-to-date news and information. The new tablets include:

Apple’s iPad announced in January 2010. The iPad quickly became the leading tablet computing device, and 25 million of the devices had been sold by June 2011.

Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook eBook reader

Amazon in 2011 released an upgraded version of its Kindle reader called Kindle Fire

Microsoft in 2012 released its Surface tablet computer

By January 2012, 19 percent of U.S. adults owned a tablet computer, 19 percent owned an eBook reader, and 29 percent owned one or the other, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. In a June 2013 report the percentage of adult tablet owners was up to 34 percent

The increased popularity of portable tablet computers has sparked debate over whether news organizations will be able to take advantage of them as a new, and potentially profitable content delivery platform.

Display Formats

A key question is what form publications and stories will take on tablets:

Will consumers favor the look and feel of websites or will more traditional magazine or newspaper style presentations prove popular?

Will people prefer using a web browser to access websites of publications, or will they gravitate toward dedicated applications that publications create to display content on a tablet device? A Miratech study found that people prefer a dedicated app to web browsing on the iPad. But a Pew Research Center survey in October 2011 reported that while two-thirds of tablet news users have a news app, the web browser was still the more popular way to consume news (40 percent of tablet news users got their news mainly via a web browser). An Online Publishers Association study in June 2012 reported that tablet owners preferred websites to applications for accessing newspaper and magazine content. A usability study by Jakob Nielsen found that websites displayed pretty well on an iPad and reading a web page thus was fairly easy.

Will the HTML5 standard for the web and JavaScript allow creation of immersive and interactive story packages and web apps viewed via a web browser that rival the experience of dedicated applications developed for the iPad and other tablet devices? See Ken Doctor’s analysis of the HTML5 vs. apps debate and the Financial Times’ success with an HTML5 web app

Will a new form emerge that improves the reader experience, making it more immersive and engaging while also allowing for more compelling and effective advertising?

Tablet News Applications

Many news organizations have experimented with different types of tablet applications to deliver news and other content.

Look at Sports Illustrated’s idea for how its content might be displayed on a tablet, the Mag+ concept for putting magazines on tablets and Wired magazine’s vision for what it might look like on an iPad.

The Orange County Register in November 2011 launched The Peel iPad app that included stories featured in the next day’s paper, a live feed of weather, traffic and breaking news and multimedia content. The application was customized for a tablet and looked nothing like the newspaper’s website or the print product. But the app was discontinued in September 2012 – see Goodnight Peel. Lessons Learned.

News Corp. launched The Daily tablet app in February 2011 to deliver daily news stories and interactive features. But the app was shut down in December 2012 after it failed to generate enough subscriptions and revenue to sustain it.

Flyp presented multimedia stories in a more magazine-like format that also included video, photos, animations, interactive graphics and text on pages you flipped through (Flyp later became Zemi, which produces multimedia stories for publishers).

And vook takes a traditional book format and adds video, interactivity and social networking.

Apple also announced in January 2012 its iBooks Author tool that journalists can use to easily create interactive multimedia long-form stories for display on the iPad.

Other applications provide personalized aggregated newsfeeds:

Flipboard provides a customized feed that combines stories from news publications and postings to social media sites

Pulse pulls in stories people select from a variety of different publications

How People Use the iPad

Especially important is whether tablet devices like the iPad offer a more leisurely lean-back reading experience at home than either cellphone browsers/applications, wh