2007

Because this week’s feature requires more research, I’m using the opportunity to return to my originally planned update schedule, weekly on Mondays rather than Wednesdays. In the meantime, this edition of Occasional Links provides some insight into an upcoming feature about the place of ‘Old Media’ in a ‘New Media’ world. While others are predicting the death of newspapers, magazines, books, and all other kinds of print content, I believe that the right kind of printed word will survive for decades to come. Read through some of the following links, and feel free to share your own thoughts on the matter.

Print Death Watch – InfoWorld, LIFE, even the world’s oldest newspaper all cancel their print editions and settle down online. Am I wrong already? Or is their content wrong for print?

What we can learn from an experiment in crowdsourcing – News-Press tries out mojos(mobile journalists), and crowdsourcing.

Within 12 hours, 68 residents had sent in stories, documents and questions, The breakthrough came within 24, when a reader sent in a copy of a highly critical but unpublished city audit of the project. Marymont said the credibility of the source and the reaction of local officials to calls about the report led the website to go with the story ahead of the paper. The result: the project was put on hold pending an investigation, leading to a follow-up story in the next day’s paper.

Washing Post Redesign as a Wiki – Information Architects Japan(whom I love as designers) has done a mockup of what The Washington Post’s website would look like as a wiki(term used loosely).

4. No: Wiki doesn’t mean that users cannot do whatever they like, the wiki is a publishing tool for editors, first of all.
5. No: Users will not need to use wikicode. Believe it or not: We found an elegant solution for that.
6. Yes, users will be able to see the history of an article.
7. We are going to post a flowchart on how a newspaper wiki works very soon.