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Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets -- beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted. Same documents, different visualizations There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering. The first is the items plot, which grew out of the proof-of-concept system we presented a year ago. Every document is a dot. Similar documents get pulled together to form visible groups, that is, clusters. All the dots start grey, but become colored as you apply tags while exploring the document set. You can click on individual documents to view them, or select a whole region of ... Continue reading →
On May 1, more than 30 independent media outlets collaborated to produce live national coverage of May Day protests. Why did these news organizations choose to collaborate -- and why on May Day? The answer has everything to do with the insufficiency of our current mass media to cover this kind of event. May Day is International Worker's Day and, since 2006, Immigrant Worker's Rights Day. This year, the Occupy movement declared May Day "a holiday for the 99% ... a day for people to come together, across all those lines which too often divide us -- race, class, gender, religion -- and challenge the systems that create these divisions." Over 100 occupations pledged to observe May Day, and at least 50 held protests, marches ... Continue reading →
We're about to close the book on the Oregon Daily Emerald. After 92 years, the University of Oregon's newspaper will end its run as a Monday-to-Friday operation in June. Yes, it's the end of an era, and we're sad about that. But it's also the start of a new era, the digital one. Next fall, we will replace our traditional newspaper with a modern college media organization, Emerald Media Group. This isn't about rebranding. This isn't about ramping up revenue for our non-profit company. Sure, we face the same economic pressures as every legacy media company. But this is our best financial year since 2000, and we have no debt and a reasonable reserve fund. This is about delivering on our mission to serve our ... Continue reading →
MediaShift delivers the best news on media and technology directly to your in-box. Continue reading →
We're about to close the book on the Oregon Daily Emerald. After 92 years, the University of Oregon's newspaper will end its run as a Monday-to-Friday operation in June. Yes, it's the end of an era, and we're sad about that. But it's also the start of a new era, the digital one. Next fall, we will replace our traditional newspaper with a modern college media organization, Emerald Media Group. This isn't about rebranding. This isn't about ramping up revenue for our non-profit company. Sure, we face the same economic pressures as every legacy media company. But this is our best financial year since 2000, and we have no debt and a reasonable reserve fund. This is about delivering on our mission to serve our ... Continue reading →
The news is spreading here in New Orleans and across the journalism world: the fabled Times-Picayune, as we all know it, may cease to exist. Visitors tour Hurricane Katrina front pages from The Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans and the Sun Herald of Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, as part of the 'Covering Katrina' exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC. (Image credit: AFP via @daylife) Writing in The New York Times, David Carr gave details in today’s edition of what seems to have been a closely guarded secret. According to his sources, Newhouse Newspapers, a division of Advance Publications, the Times-Pic’s owner, plans to discontinue the daily paper and embrace the model that it used in Ann Arbor, Mich. That means relying heavily on the ... Continue reading →
Two and a half years to the day since the world's worst-ever single mass killing of journalists took place in the southern Philippines, many suspects remain at large, the trial is stalled, and victim's families are being harassed and intimidated. MANILA -- Most days, Philippine presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda does a White House-style briefing with Manila's press corps, spinning the Malacañang Palace line on the latest news and policy developments and fielding questions from the journalists wedged into high-school type desks and shoehorned between a mass of cables, cameras and audio gear. The vibe is relaxed, even jocose, but the questions are sharp, and if Lacierda doesn't answer adequately, the reporters press harder. As it should be, and with the country's chief justice facing impeachment ... Continue reading →
The following is the text from a speech given by Eric Newton, the senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation, earlier this month at a national conference of journalism educators at Middle Tennessee State University. The text has been edited for length. You can read the entire version here. In 2005, two of America's largest foundations created the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. This was before Facebook got big. Before Twitter, Instagram, Groupon or Pinterest. Before the iPhone or the iPad. Before the largest collapse in American newsroom history, with vanishing local journalism jobs totaling more than 15,000. You might think we launched a project on the future of journalism education because we saw all that coming. We didn't. The ... Continue reading →
