GigaOM has strengthen its position in the technology news market, against rivals such as Techcrunch, having agreed to buy paidContent publisher, ContentNext Media, from Guardian News & Media for an undisclosed sum.
GigaOM picsk up the main paidContent website, paidContent:UK, and its events business as well as mocoNews.net and contentSutra.com. Read More
Interesting video interview here with designer Francesco Franchi, from Italy’s Intelligence in Lifestyle magazine, who talks about “infographic thinking” and “visual” journalism”. Read More
This should be useful Twitter has launched a new account that is dedicated to spotlighting some of the best practices and innovative uses of Twitter by journalists and newsrooms.
Twitter says the account will focus on “innovative Twitter use across all types of news & journalism – not just breaking”. Interesting that it comes in a week when Twitter said that it wasn’t a media company. Read More
Interesting move here from Facebook which is hiring more journalists. It has has just gone out and hired a managing editor in the form of Bloomberg journalist Dan Fletcher to be the company’s managing editor leading some to speculate the social network has increasingly larger plans for online news. Read More
The fallout from the AOL acquisition of Techcrunch continues as former writer, Sarah Lacy, launches a news site, called PandoDaily, which is being dubbed “TechCrunch 2.0 by some.
PandoDaily, which will focus almost exclusively on tech start-ups, launches today and is backed by a number of investors including TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, who left the site he founded in September unhappy (but richer) after the earlier sale to AOL. Read More
Dailymail.co.uk and Guardian.co.uk are the most visible UK newspaper web sites on social networks such as Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter, according to some new figures.
The Mail averages about 2.9m links per week, while the Guardian is linked about 2.5m times per week, according to a study by Search metrics. The Telegraph (0.88m links), Independent (0.61m) and the Sun (0.2m) rounded out the top five. Read More
BBC Breaking News: exempt from "two pairs of eyes" rule
I once claimed that all self-help books could be scrapped and replaced with a piece of paper saying ‘be sensible’. So I enjoyed the fact that the BBC’s social media guidelines have gone for a similar approach, exhorting staff members to refrain from ‘doing anything stupid’.
If you’re running any kind of a corporate account, it might well be worth checking out the BBC’s guidelines on how Twitter and Facebook feeds for programmes or genres are carried out.
Ben Grubb: tech journalist arrested and released
An Australian technology journalist was arrested by the Queensland police yesterday and had is iPad seized after writing a report on a presentation given by someone else at a conference looking at security.
Ben Grubb, deputy technology editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, has since been released although it seems that, at the time of writing, the police still have his iPad.
Most journalists view the term “brand journalism” with scepticism, but it is nevertheless appropriate as the content that companies impart to their corporate “audience” must be entertaining, relevant and current. While most corporate “users” do not expect this type of communication to suddenly become subject to the same independent principles as many journalists might expect, they do insist on transparency. Read More
Columbia Journalism School: advice for journalists
Following on from yesterday’s story about how readers are finding their way to online news comes an interesting story about how journalists are going to need to change the way they work in response to the erosion of online advertising.
No matter how much the guys behind the research at Columbia Journalism School try to sweeten the medicine, journalists are probably going to find it bitter, because the advice goes against every instinct that makes a journalist good at their job: listen to advertisers.
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