Get your news all in one place with Google Fast Flip. Google Fast Flip allows the viewer to look at several news websites at the same time. When a story catches your eye you can click on the page and then read the article and be led to another story. You can choose your topics and sources you would like to be led too. You can also customize your own section with topics or news sites that interest you.

Ben LaMothe, who writes a blog for Online Journalism Blog, likes the idea of Fast Flip. Paul Bradshaw, who also writes for Online Journalism Blog, does not seem as overly enthusiastic with the whole idea.

Now for me, I think it is a nice application, to be able to see the front page of all of the websites I enjoy to looking at in one place. It is also nice to go to one site and get all of the news I want. But wasn’t that what Google News was for? Why was there a need to produce Fast Flip? And if you refer to the previous post, the CEO of Google was saying they were not trying to hurt the newspaper business. So why make a site that simulates turning or flipping pages.

To me it looks like Google is trying to compensate to the readers out there who like to turn the pages.

What do you think of Google Fast Flip? If you haven’t checked it out, check out the video below or check it out yourself and come back and let me know what you think. The mobile version is available of iPhone and Android.

Via the Online Journalism Blog, Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Lab, has a post on why charging online won’t work for papers, and why ‘nichepapers’ are a viable root out of the financial crisis for those wishing to provide news:

Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it.

Nichepapers aren’t a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They’re a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to 21st century business. They’re not the same old newspaper, sold a different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules, that are letting radical innovators reinvent what “news” is.

Nichepapers are the future of news because their economics are superior. All the Nichepapers above are “real” enterprises, with staff, offices, and fixed and variable costs. Nichepapers offer more bang for the buck: greater benefits for far less cost. Readers get more, better, and faster content — while publishers realize lower capital intensity, lower distribution, marketing, and production costs, and less risk. What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness.And that’s really the point.

Profitability can’t be recaptured from a commodity. Newspapers used to be yesterday’s most profitable industry. Warren Buffett made his fortune by investing in newspapers, yesterday. Yet, today, business model innovation, aka “monetization,” is the surest, quickest path to self-destruction. Charging once more for the same old “content” — as argued for by David Simon, in an impassioned CJR article — will inevitably lead newspapers exactly where it led banks investment “banks” and automakers: into economic implosion.

To reinvent the buying and selling of news, it’s necessary first to reconceive the making of news. The AP’s latest attempt at business model innovation, for example, is a heavyweight “rights management” system for the same old stuff. But protecting yesterday’s “product” is exactly what prevented the music industry and Hollywood from rediscovering the art of value creation.

Haque provides a convincing case: why is it, for example, that local papers give over a decent amount of their pages to national news, which their readers will be getting elsewhere and in more depth? Instead, as nichepapers, they could concentrate on covering those issues and areas which are neglected by other media. Does anyone really buy their regional daily to read about goings on in Westminster and celebrity gossip?

Of course, and this becomes clearer when exploring Haque’s whole post, he is not really talking about a print product. But ‘nichepapers’, especially in the form of hyper-local papers with smaller staff, a more active community and coupled with relevant, localised advertising, could well be a successful, new business model for local papers.

ONLINE JOURNALISM BLOG: Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian’s URLs 328,288 times over the last four months – way more than any other UK newspaper, according to OJB writer Malcolm Coles’  full analysis here.

ONLINE JOURNALISM BLOG: Here’s a very useful tool if you come across an article that gives you a whole bunch of RSS feeds you’d like to subscribe to – or, indeed, if you’re writing such a post yourself. READ MORE>

ONLINE JOURNALISM BLOG: The question is no longer just a hypothetical one. With increasing convergence between social media and traditional content, what is known as a traditional news website might not exist in the coming years. READ MORE>

EVOLVING NEWSROOM: Online Journalism Blog writer Paul Bradshaw posted a primer a while back on how the web has changed the economics of news. It’s a good read if you’re new to thinking about new media business models but also well worth reading as a refresher. READ MORE>

Paul Bradshaw, JEEcamp organiser, has strong views on journalism’s future.

People will not pay for content but only a platform, he argues, so journalists should create their content around services. Hear what he has to say in a short interview outside the event.

If your reader does not let you see the video, click on this link to access the post and see the video.

Paul Tweets @paulbradshaw and writes the Online Journalism Blog.

O Online Jounalism Blog traz um post caudaloso sobre uma tendência de convergência que já vínhamos observando desde o ano passado: o uso de games on-line como complemento ao noticiário _o newsgaming.

O texto cita o pesquisador Nick Diakopoulos, da Georgia Tech, para quem os jogos ajudam o usuário a ter uma compreensão mais ampla do significado e das causas de determinados acontecimentos.

É um mercado que, não duvide, crescerá _e muito_ nos próximos meses. Um investimento se as redações on-line quiserem estar sintonizadas com as mudanças impostas pela tecnologia.

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to Martin Langeveld’s assertion that only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. Dan Thornton counters with a compelling argument that the comparison between print and online readers isn’t very useful. And that the numbers Langeveld uses as the basis for his calculation may be way off:

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

It’s true. AP Chairman Dean Singleton said so in his remarks at the AP Annual Meeting, held yesterday in San Diego:

AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.

In other words, Glenn Beck has now found a kindred spirit.

Peter Kafka, while sympathizing with the AP, doubts the nascent crusade’s effectiveness:

The thing is, even if the news guys somehow stopped people from using Google to find information they need, it wouldn’t do anything to solve the essential problems plaguing their business. Such as:

• An overabundance of undifferentiated, commodity information.
• The wholesale evaporation of classified advertising and local retail advertising.
• Investors who paid too much for newspapers and other media assets during the last 10 years, using too much debt.

Paul Bradshaw explains why the AP’s threats to police the Web for misusing its content is a boneheaded business move.

Look, I know the economy sucks (believe me, I know firsthand) but this recent proclivity for referencing Howard Beale’s rant in Network isn’t going to produce something constructive out of shared outrage. Unless by “constructive” you mean “ridiculed on Colbert.”

Image via Wikipedia

Paul Bradshaw, author of the Online Journalism blog (OJB), will be running an MA course in online journalism at Birmingham City University from September this year.

If you’re considering a career in either business or consumer media journalism, I’d strongly recommend reading about the course here. The OJB is an excellent site too and is worth checking out here if you haven’t already.

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• Online Journalism Blog: What should an MA in Online Journalism teach? (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
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The Eyeborg project. A camera in an artificial eye - the future of journalism? Photo: Eyeborg

Every day now, there seems to be news about journalists being sacked. The financial crisis is one obvious reason, but the changing and unstable business models for media companies are other reasons for worries. Journalists are struggling with the same questions as musicians, filmmaker, writers, photographers, i.e. how to spread your work digitally, but at the same make money on your products?

I went to the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels last week, and wrote a few pieces for Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog:

• Shift is happening – useful advice for young journalists
• The future of online journalism, according to Rue89 and Demotix (which was picked up here, in Spanish and here at the Belgian investigative journalism site).
• Obama’s way around mainstream media

Journalism.co.uk has all the details from the DNA09.

One presentation that I didn’t got the chance to follow, was the Eyeborg project. Funny enough, Eirik Newth at Fremtidsbloggen (a blog about the future) , who wasn’t at the conference, as far as I know, wrote about it (in Norwegian) two days ago. To give you an idea – a Canadian filmmaker wants so place a camera in his artificial eye. Now, that is reality tv!

This is the week of multitasking – not too unusual in my world.

I’ve started blogging at Europabloggen, a blog about Europe and EU, from a Norwegian perspective (sounds like a contradiction, you say?). Oslo/Berlin-based journalists Olav Anders Øvrebø and Dag Yngland are the two other contributors. As you can see, Europabloggen is just at its very beginning, and we will soon move the blog to a new platform with more stuff, but we wanted to start writing before everything was ready (what is actually finished in these beta times?). Today, I wrote about EU’s Cyberella (increasing number of women in technology) project.

Tomorrow, I’m going to write for Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog from the Digital News Affairs conference here in Brussels. I especially look forward to hear Jeff Jarvis talking about how the economic downturn will and already has effected media.

Friday, two very interesting women are meeting at the Oslo Region European office for their tradition International Women’s day lunch. Marinne Aasen, a Norwegian Labour politician will meet Clo Willaerts, the brain and magic hand behind the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner. I’m going to moderate the discussion.

Actually, it’s ‘journalist for two days’. Frank from Frankwatching (one of the leading Dutch marketing blogs, with over 20.000 subscribers alone (RSS, newsletter, Twitter)) has asked me to report about the DNA event in Brussels for his blog.

Couldn’t and didn’t want to say no, so I took a two day leave at work. For quite a few years already, I have been attending conferences like DNA from a visitor’s perspective. But now it’s time to go the journalist way. Again, because in a far away past  – not that far but it surely feels like that- I used to be a journalist, not the project manager I am today. Curious whether I’ll be able to undust my reporting skills fast enough. But I’m also convinced it will work out just fine.

I’m also looking forward to meet Paul Bradshaw and Robin Hamman again. I met Paul at Picnic 2007 and since then I occasionally write for his Online Journalism Blog. As for Robin: he was at the Blogboat event in 2008. I didn’t get the chance to speak to him but now I definetely will take the chance!

If you are at the event as well or if you have some tips for me (to interview someone in particular eg), please let me know!!

mass media news is killing you?

paul bradshaw shows a different choice.

A double dose you for you lucky people!

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Jeff Bercovici levanta, no Portfolio.com, um tema bacana e que está relegado ao último plano no Brasil (pouca gente se debruçou sobre ele, essa é a verdade): o wikijornalismo.

Duvido que Bercovici saiba do que se trata, mas seu clamor por maior transparência no jornalismo on-line _especificamente para que sites e portais exibam a seus leitores todo o histórico de uma reportagem publicada na Web, com suas atualizações e correções_ seria resolvido exatamente com isso, um wiki.

Em suma, um texto em código aberto passível de ser atualizado por qualquer um, e cujas alterações ficam registradas usuário após usuário. É o modelo que vemos, por exemplo, na Wikipedia.

Um cara que estudou esse negócio a fundo é o professor inglês Paul Bradshaw, que chegou a imaginar a proposta substituindo, por exemplo, a blogagem. Não prosperou, mas o debate ainda está de pé.

Só um wiki poderia atender a contento à proposta de Bercovici. É como comenta um editor do jornal inglês The Times no texto: “nossas páginas se transformariam numa enorme confusão”. Sem dúvida: imagine palavras riscadas ou parágrafos inteiros com indicações de alterações, títulos duplicados porque foram alterados… enfim: inviável.

Colaboraria com a transparência do jornalismo on-line conhecer que mudanças um texto na Web passou ao longo do dia? Provavelmente. Isso, entretanto, não exclui a necessidade de correções (e ainda são poucos os sites relevantes que possuem uma lista de notícias só para abrigá-las _isso sim é falta de transparência, não?)

Agora, e para não perdermos a discussão de vista, cito o wikijornalismo não como um espaço de convivência pro-am, ou seja, entre jornalistas profissionais e cidadãos.

Não vejo, ao menos no Brasil, maturidade para este modelo no momento. Logo, esse nosso “wiki transparente” seria capenga e teria de ter restrições de acesso. Mas seria uma opção a uma página incompreensível e cheia de rabiscos.

ATUALIZAÇÃO: Protegido pelo muro do conteúdo pago, o texto de Jeff Bercovici pode ser acessado via máquinas de busca.

Would you be impressed by a candidate boasting the University of Salford’s proposed MA in Social Media (hat tip Chi-chi Ekweozor)?

Recruitment is becoming a key issue for any traditional company building its digital business. Does it continue to appoint people in the image of its existing employees, and then spend months training them, or should a company only consider candidates with a minimum social media footprint?

The Guardian has just recruited Lauren Luke, a 27-year-old single mother and YouTube make-up star, as a columnist. As Online Journalism Blog’s Paul Bradshaw says

I’ve written previously that if you want to get into journalism you should have a blog. I’d add to that: if you want your own column, you should build up a following on YouTube too. News organisations will increasingly not just be looking for people who know what they’re talking about, but how to distribute it effectively online.

Note that Ms Luke is a make-up artiste first and a YouTuber second. Similarly no company, whatever its legacy, is suddenly going to drop its requirement for core skills and be seduced by social media. 

Calculators, emails and now Twitter

Social media is just the next technological development to impact on the workplace. When the excitement has died down, what would be the point of knowing about the kit rather than the core skills themselves? Did we appoint people in the 1970s who knew how to use calculators or shortlist candidates in the 1990s who were good at sending emails?  Why appoint someone skilled in Twitter if they cannot write, market or sell?

No. All we need are people good at the core skills who happen to have set up a blog, a Twitter account and/or used LinkedIn.

It does not seem much to ask. But it ain’t an MA.

Photo credit: David the Pimp Daddy

Pesquisa realizada com 200 jornalistas de 30 países mostrou resultados interessantes quanto a como ter um blog afeta a forma de um profissional da imprensa trabalhar.

Os jornalistas sentiram de maneira mais intensa o feedback dos seus leitores, por meio de comentários e resultados de enquetes nos seus blogs. Eles começaram a perceber necessidades diferentes em seu público e, em alguns casos, chegavam a sugerir assuntos de notícias no blog e desenvolviam os assuntos que fossem os escolhidos.

Mas os jornalistas tiveram diferentes tipos de percepções de acordo com as áreas nas quais trabalhavam. Respondendo à pergunta: “Bloggar mudou a forma como você desenvolve suas idéias de histórias e/ou de leads?” tivemos pouco mais de 20% dos jornalistas de jornais impressos dizendo que suas idéias não mudaram em nada. Mas a maioria dos profissionais de impressos, rádio, televisão e revistas respondeu “enormemente” ou “completamente”.

Outra questão apontada nas notícias diz respeito ao que os gringos chamam de “newsgathering”, ou seja, o processo de coleta de informações e a forma como a notícia chega até o jornalista. Muitos profissionais se manifestaram mais tensos com a obrigação de atualizar seus blogs, o que significou aumento da demanda de trabalho. Isso interferiu, inclusive, na forma de apuração, visto que a rapidez da internet às vezes os obrigou a publicar mesmo sem ter certeza da informação. Algo muito sério, a meu ver. Mesmo que depois o erro seja concertado em tempo real, o estrago pode já estar feito. 

Por fim, uma das conclusões mais interessantes, a meu ver, envolve mudanças no estilo de escrever do jornalista, que se tornou mais pessoal e menos formal. Os jornalistas disseram estarem mais “criativos” e terem conseguido encontrar a sua “voz” e sendo mais concisos, escrevendo menos e sendo objetivos. Para eles, a web oferece uma tecnologia que permite a “expansão” da forma de trabalhar, que vai muito além do que a TV, o rádio ou o impresso oferecem. Eles também manifestram satisfação em ter um espaço para contar detalhes e curiosidades de notícias e dos bastidores que, se eles não tivessem blogs, jamais chegariam a público. “São interessantes, mas isso não significa que tenham espaço no jornal, na TV ou no rádio”, manifestaram muitos profissionais.

A pesquisa “Blogging Journalists” foi idealizada por Paul Bradshaw, do Online Journalism Blog. Veja os resultados desse trabalho na íntegra e em inglês.