MSM is so bloody SLOW: example this story on Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites

I have made many references on this blog to MSM sites, including the NYT, linking to other sites (link journalism- pity I didn't label them, which I will now start doing).

Good article, about this topic below from the NYT, but just so behind the news curve. This is really OLD news and I don't think there is anything in it that I didn't know already.

Re. the NYT and link journalism the main points are:

The New York Times is developing a version of the home page “that will contain links to other news sites and blogs alongside the articles we publish,” The Times’s chief technology officer, Marc Frons, told Web readers in July. That feature, called Times Extra, will be published using a technology called Blogrunner that the Times acquired in 2005.

I've also joined TimesPeople and can see some staff picks from NYT People, but by no means all. A search for example of Mr. Sulzberger and numerous other NYT editors does not show their involvement and there is no Staff Picks, so I am in the process of creating my own Staff Picks by searching on IHT and NYT journalists when I visit TimesPeople (got the photo problem resolved, so my score is now up to 6 out of 10, but as I posted about it, link journalism is a must for me to get the score up).

October 13, 2008
Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites
By BRIAN STELTER
“Thou shalt not link to outside sites” — a long-held commandment of many newsrooms — is eroding.
Embracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors — acting in effect like aggregators. The Washington Post recently introduced a political Web site that recommends rival sites. This week NBC will begin introducing Web sites for its local TV stations with links to local newspapers, radio stations, online videos and other sources. And The New York Times will soon offer its online readers an alternative home page with links to competitors.
These experiments exemplify “link journalism,” an idea that is gaining traction in other newsrooms across the country. “It is a fundamentally different mindset” for journalists, said Scott Karp, chief of the Web-based newswire Publish2, who coined the term.
For years, newspapers, television station Web sites and magazines have hesitated about linking to outside Web sites because, the logic goes, they want to keep the users on their own site. More internal page views and longer time-spent-viewing can equate to larger advertising revenue for Web sites.
Mr. Karp argues that Google, the leading search engine, is a direct rebuttal to that logic. “It’s all about sending people away, and it does such a good job of it that people keep coming back for more,” he said.
NBC hopes to benefit from the same user behavior. Beginning with its Chicago affiliate, WMAQ, on Monday, the company will turn its TV station Web sites into full-fledged city guides. John P. Wallace, the president of NBC’s local media division, said the partnerships with content providers and the links to third-party sites will “tap into our communities much deeper than we have been able to historically.”
“It’s a change in mindset,” he said. “We’re looking at the fragmented local market and saying, ‘We’re going to provide a destination where you can come and search across different segments.’ ”
Brian Buchwald, the division’s senior vice president for local digital media and multiplatform, said the move amounts to an acknowledgment that local television stations must do more online than merely regurgitate their newscasts online. “We need to be a lot more than just TV stations if we’re going to be relevant,” he said.
NBC’s local media operation has hired about 55 people to create original content and filter the Web. A test version of the Chicago site last week linked to The Chicago Sun-Times, USA Today, TMZ and the local blog Chicagoist. The sites do not distinguish between the articles written by their own staff members and the links to outside sites.
“If we can provide them great content, that’s wonderful. If it comes from somebody else, that’s fine, too,” Mr. Buchwald said.
As simple as that sounds, it represents an attitude shift. While linking to other sources is not a new occurrence by any means, it can still seem misguided to journalists who work vigorously to break a story ahead of other news outlets.
Mr. Karp believes the use of blogs by news organizations has helped newsroom managers accept that filtering the Web for visitors is a valuable editorial function. For bloggers, linking to original reporting, primary sources and discussions about stories is a form of etiquette, assigning credit to others who have written about a topic.
Jeff Jarvis, a prominent blogger who directs the Graduate School of Journalism’s new-media program at the City University of New York, has said that the culture of linking was creating a “new architecture of news.”
“Link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff,” he proposed in June. His “Golden Rule of Links” for journalists, naturally, earned at least 25 links from other bloggers.
Newsrooms seem more open than ever to that view. The New York Times is developing a version of the home page “that will contain links to other news sites and blogs alongside the articles we publish,” The Times’s chief technology officer, Marc Frons, told Web readers in July. That feature, called Times Extra, will be published using a technology called Blogrunner that the Times acquired in 2005.
Other Web sites are aggregating links manually: ProPublica, the nonprofit newsroom venture led by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, has dedicated a section of its site to “Breaking on the Web,” a collection of links to the investigative reporting of others.
Last month The Washington Post added “Political Browser,” a professed source of “what’s good on the Web,” to its site. The page freely links to competitors with features like “Required Reading,” summing up articles in newspapers and magazines, and “Staff Picks,” a list of articles that Post employees are reading. Lest its own newspaper be forgotten, a “Best of the Post” section links to its own articles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/media/13reach.html?ref=media

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
NYT

Vacation /Business Trip Furnished Rental Apartment in Paris

Foreign bureaus cost a lot of money especially if you have to employ a platoon size CP team.

"The evolving story in Iraq does present editing and conceptualization challenges right now," New York Times foreign editor Susan Chira said in an e-mail. "It's more amorphous. There's less overt conflict. And government and public attention is to some degree shifting to Afghanistan and Pakistan."

I do like blogging about the use of Reuters, but that's where the majority of the NYT's Iraq coverage is coming from.

The number of front-page stories with Iraq datelines published by the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which continue to maintain large Baghdad bureaus, has dropped each year since the war began. The three dailies published 858 front-page stories with Iraq datelines in 2003, 379 last year and just 138 during the first nine months of 2008.

Western Journalists in Iraq Stage Pullback of Their Own

By Ernesto Londoño and Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 11, 2008; A01



BAGHDAD -- The number of foreign journalists in Baghdad is declining sharply, a media withdrawal that reflects Iraq's growing stability and the financial strains faced by some news organizations.

In a stark indication of the changing media focus here, the number of journalists traveling with American forces in Iraq has plummeted in the past year. U.S. military officials say they "embedded" journalists 219 times in September 2007. Last month, the number shrank to 39. Of the dozen U.S. newspapers and newspaper chains that maintained full-time bureaus in Baghdad in the early years of the war, only four are still permanently staffed by foreign correspondents. CBS and NBC no longer keep a correspondent in Baghdad year-round.

"It remains important and it remains interesting," said Alissa J. Rubin, the New York Times' acting bureau chief in Baghdad. "But what's in front of us now is almost a static situation. There's not a clear narrative line. The stories are more complex."

Veteran journalists say stories about Iraq, where roughly 155,000 U.S. troops are deployed and where the United States spends approximately $10 billion a month, have become tougher to get on the air and into print. News coverage that once centered largely on the U.S. military experience is shifting, like the country itself, to a story of Iraqis taking the halting, often mundane steps toward building their own government.

More than five years after the U.S.-led invasion, many of the most important stories in Iraq, such as debate over election laws and negotiations over the legal framework that will govern the presence of U.S. troops here after the United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year, are playing out incrementally and often behind closed doors.

Gen. David G. Perkins, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said stories about violence get top billing. Less-sensational events, such as a recent voter-registration drive for the highly anticipated provincial elections expected early next year, go largely uncovered in the Western news media, he said.

"There are a lot of things going on, a lot of very complicated things going on. And to cover that, you really have to understand the details and the sophistication of it," Perkins said. "When you have a big explosion where 20 people die, it doesn't take much understanding of the intricacies of what's going on in the country to run out there with a camera and report that 20 people have been killed."

The press corps began shrinking as the security situation deteriorated in the fall of 2004 and several news organizations deemed it too costly and dangerous to keep journalists in Iraq. An American journalist was fatally shot in Basra in 2005 and others came under fire in Fallujah.

During some periods of the war, particularly the height of sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007, embedding with the U.S. military became the only way of reaching much of the country. News organizations that remained in the country saw their security costs soar. Most purchased armored vehicles, which often cost more than $100,000, and hired Western and local security guards at rates exceeding $1,500 a day.

As security has improved, though, journalists have begun to travel with relative ease and to secure interviews with people who just months ago were too afraid to talk. But the increasingly political nature of the story, and the deteriorating situation on America's other battlefields, poses new challenges for journalists here and in newsrooms back home.

"The evolving story in Iraq does present editing and conceptualization challenges right now," New York Times foreign editor Susan Chira said in an e-mail. "It's more amorphous. There's less overt conflict. And government and public attention is to some degree shifting to Afghanistan and Pakistan."

U.S. military officials say they remain eager to embed journalists with U.S. troops, but many journalists in Baghdad say the military has grown reluctant to take journalists to the front lines. Coverage of recent military operations in Basra, Sadr City, Mosul and Diyala province, for example, relied heavily on phone reporting and information from Iraqis working as stringers for Western news organizations.

But privately, U.S. military officials acknowledge that they are not eager to showcase American military-led combat operations at a time when the Iraqi government is calling for a more limited role for U.S. troops and pushing for firm withdrawal timelines.

"It's very clear that they are trying to push us away from active areas of combat and trying to push us to places" where reconstruction and training are underway, said Associated Press bureau chief Robert H. Reid. "It's very difficult to pick an embed unit and be relatively assured you will see active combat."

American newspapers, which have contracted sharply in recent years as readership and advertising revenue have declined, have published fewer Iraq stories this year, and placed a smaller percentage of them on their front pages, than during any other period of the war in Iraq.

The number of front-page stories with Iraq datelines published by the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which continue to maintain large Baghdad bureaus, has dropped each year since the war began. The three dailies published 858 front-page stories with Iraq datelines in 2003, 379 last year and just 138 during the first nine months of 2008.

"When you have other things going on in the world -- a financial crisis, elections and Afghanistan, which is now becoming a more serious conflict -- it's harder to get on the air," said National Public Radio's Baghdad bureau chief, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, who has been covering Iraq on and off since 2002. "The bar is higher."

The Los Angeles Times' Baghdad bureau chief, Tina Susman, took on that role in early 2007 as the increase in U.S. troops was getting underway amid endemic violence. The paper recently downsized its bureau from three to two foreign correspondents.

"During my first 12 months here, it was unusual to get to bed before 4 and even 5 a.m. because the story was so huge and because of the likelihood that it was headed for A1," she said. "That really has changed in the past few months. . . . That's dispiriting. How do media bosses, especially the American ones, justify not maintaining a presence in a country where there are 145,000 U.S. forces and where 4,100 have died?"

The Washington Post has sent more than 70 reporters, photographers and columnists to Iraq since the start of the war. The invasion was covered by more than a dozen journalists from the newspaper. In recent years, the size of the bureau has fluctuated, but the paper has assigned two or three journalists to the war on a permanent basis and brought in many more for temporary assignments. The newspaper's expenses for war coverage exceed $1 million a year.

Last year, Iraq was by far the dominant story on the evening television news, according to Andrew Tyndall, a network news analyst who tracks coverage on his Web site. But in recent months, Baghdad-based network reporters have gone weeks at a time without getting Iraq pieces on the evening news.

The three networks aired 130 stories with Iraq datelines on the evening news between September 2007 and September 2008, compared with 242 during the previous 12 months, according to a search on Tyndall's online database.

"Everyone realizes it's an important story," said ABC correspondent Miguel Marquez, who has covered Iraq since 2005. "But it's been six years of this. . . . The situation has become more nuanced. The U.S. doesn't seem to have its hand in everything anymore."

CNN and Fox News have kept large staffs in Baghdad. But they're being asked to do fewer live reports, broadcast journalists say. CNN now routinely keeps just one crew in the bureau, when just a few months ago two or three was the norm.

Western news organizations will soon grapple with an additional challenge. Many of their Iraqi employees -- who are often better suited for certain reporting assignments than Western journalists -- will soon be eligible to move to the United States under a new refugee program. Since the program was announced this summer, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has received several dozen applications.

"I don't know what's going on in America this year," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker who said he receives far fewer interview requests from Western journalists. "Maybe it's because of the election. I think they are less interested."

Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/10/AR2008101002934.html?hpid=topnews

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
NYT

Vacation /Business Trip Furnished Apartment in Paris

Campaign articles from Newsweek become e-books for Amazon Kindle

Campaign articles from Newsweek become e-books for Amazon Kindle
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Monday, October 13, 2008
It would seem to be a magazine's dream in these straitened times: Take something you have already published and sold, repackage it and distribute it without all that expense of paper, ink and trucks, and then sell it again.
This week, Newsweek will publish four books, one about each of the major presidential and vice presidential candidates — Senators John McCain, Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, and Governor Sarah Palin — books that will not appear in print but will be available only as e-books from Amazon.com for download to Amazon's Kindle device.
The books will contain versions of articles that Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Company, has already published during the campaign. Turning this kind of collection into books is an old idea; what is new is to do it with such minimal production and distribution costs that even the most limited sales could be profitable.
Amazon says this is probably the first such venture by a publication, but it is not likely to be the last.
"We think it's a very interesting model that could broaden," said Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle reading device. "This could start to change the way at least some books are published."
The books, at $9.99, will go on sale Wednesday and can be ordered starting Monday.
Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, approached Amazon with the idea about a month ago. The use of material published over the course of the campaign points to another advantage of digital books: a fast turnaround time.
"Every magazine editor thinks their stuff should be in an anthology, but that's hard to do economically," Meacham said. "Here's a way of doing it more quickly and with virtually no overhead. This is competing in the digital space with our traditional strengths, and that's been hard to do."
News magazines, like newspapers, have struggled financially, with circulation and advertising in decline. The economic downturn has cut deeply into advertising, while the magazines are forced to compete with many sources of information available instantly, and usually free, on the Internet.
The Kindle, introduced in November, costs $359. Amazon offers 180,000 books for wireless download, along with more than 40 newspapers and magazines.
The potential audience may be voracious, but it remains relatively small — Amazon will not say how many Kindles it has sold. Industry analysts have estimated that the figure is in the low hundreds of thousands.
But the experiment is appealing "because anyone who owns a Kindle is someone we want as a reader," Meacham said. "We're putting it in front of committed readers."

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
NYT

Vacation /Business Trip Furnished Rental Apartment in Paris

Creative thinking at Washington Post (AP)

'Wash Post' Launching New Political Site -- With Links to Rivals
WASHINGTON he Washington Post is launching a new Web section linking readers to the best of political coverage-- even scoops by rival newspapers.
The idea behind the Political Browser, expected to start Monday, is to brief political junkies on the top "must reads" of the day, from an article on a scandal to a humorous video making the rounds on Google Inc.'s YouTube.
Encouraging readers to leave one's own Web site to find more content was unthinkable not long ago. But traditional news organizations including the Post have started breaking down their "walled garden" mentality in the past few years.
The shift is partly a response to the growing influence of bloggers, who link to items they find interesting regardless of the source.
News organizations that continue to resist could find themselves irrelevant in the digital age _ an unnerving prospect when news companies need the Internet to offset declines in print advertising and circulation.
"Our relationship with readers is changing," said Jim Brady, the site's executive editor. "We're not just about providing readers with terrific journalism from The Washington Post but access to great journalism, period.
"Readers may not trust the paper and come back if they sense Post editors try to play down scoops by competitors, Brady said. Knowing readers tend to check multiple sources anyway, he said, the Post hopes at least to be the front door to political coverage online and encourage more people to visit its ad-supported site.
The Post, a unit of The Washington Post Co., already lets some columnists link to other sources in blog-like fashion, but Brady said this would be the Post's first whole section to offer such links. The Political Browser will be separate from the Post's existing political section, which features coverage by the Post's own reporters.
The Post's new section won't be the only outlet aggregating political news from around the Web. Many blogs perform that role, as do some e-mail newsletters. Brady said he hoped the Post's offering will find a niche through its brevity and its perch in Washington.
Call it a "cheat sheet for politics," Brady said. "This is not something others haven't done, but the Post has a pretty strong brand name in this area."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com:80/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003853083



A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
NYT

Vacation /Business Trip Furnished Apartment in Paris

Washington Post names Marcus Brauchli as top editor

Signaling a generational change at one of the nation's most influential newspapers, the new publisher of The Washington Post on Monday selected an outsider as the paper's top editor.
Marcus Brauchli, a former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, will become the executive editor of The Post on Sept. 8, at a time of great upheaval in the industry. At age 47, he is young enough to remain in place in for many years, working alongside the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, who is 42 and has been in her job for five months.
He will succeed Leonard Downie Jr., 66, who has led The Post's newsroom for 17 years, guiding it to numerous accolades, including six Pulitzer Prizes this year, the most in its history.
But Brauchli (pronounced BROW-klee) and Weymouth take the helm at a time when The Post, like the newspaper industry as a whole, is buffeted by budget cuts, a shrinking newsroom, falling advertising revenue and declining circulation.
"I don't think it's a case of her wanting to shake the place up as much as her having to," said Benjamin Bradlee, a former executive editor who is a vice president of the Washington Post Company. "She feels the urgency to change and adapt, and thank heaven."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/07/business/08cndbrauchli.php