Peter Shankman recently told the story of how lazy/dumb/thoughtless PR types can be when he forwards a journalist request and gets mostly lame and irrelevant replies. His conclusion: Is this what the agencies are teaching their employees to do? If it is, reporters have every right to hate public relations professionals. We’re not doing our … Read more
I’ve been looking recently at different ways that newspapers can add value to the news they produce, and one of them is using technology to better mine the information that’s available to bring out themes and nuances that might otherwise be lost. But does it always work? The post popular page on the WSJ.com website … Read more
The annoying thing with social media is that you can’t really control it. If you insist on having a section listing the most-read stories, say, you can’t really fiddle with it without making it pretty meaningless. The English-language version of the People’s Daily website, for example, doesn’t have any story on Tibet displayed prominently on … Read more
Twitter is now a news service in its own right. ReadWrite Web, an excellent website dedicated to Web 2.0 stuff, points out that the recent earthquake in England–not that unusual in itself, apparently, but rarely actually strong enough to be felt by humans—was reported first by Twitterers and by a Twitter-only news service called BreakingNewsOn … Read more
Newspaper delivery guy, Jakarta 2007 Over at Loose Wire sister site ten minutes I just wrote a review of ShifD, a new Web 2.0 clippings service that works, in theory, between desktop and mobile. More interesting, I reckoned (quoting myself; sorry), is that it’s developed by two guys from within The New York Times’ R&D … Read more