• Among all of the announcements made by Google this week, Living Stories struck me as by far the most interesting. This has serious implications the near future of news. Why? Because it’s experimenting with a few important concepts: the topic as the base element of journalism, time as a perspective on a topic, filtering to learn more about specific elements of a story, and personalization to tailor the learning experience. Currently there’s no functionality for users to participate in the production of the page, a key component of the news wiki idea I’ve written about before, but what they have is a very cool start. Paul Bradshaw has more. (tks Brian Manzullo!)
• BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly, aka the second annual mecca for innovation in journalism, will be at Temple University on April 24th, 2010.
• On PBS MediaShift, Roland Legrand covers the biggest reasons why young journalists are the most risk-averse in the newsroom. The most astute observation: the younger journalists in a newsroom could have higher opportunity costs in regards to exploration and experimentation because the traditional method of getting ahead in a career is to “acquire the skills and emulate the behaviors displayed by the older leaders within that environment.”
• Google Analytics recently added 8 new features. Analytics intelligence and custom alerts look mighty interesting.
• Andrew Spittle built another at-a-glance visualization for the Whitman Pioneer: Grid View.
• On College Media Matters, Dan Reimold has an exclusive interview with the founders of the College News Network. They’re bootstrapping a content-sharing network to fill the void of UWIRE and hope to eventually partner with a publication in every state.

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• What’s coming down the pike for Courier - New features in short order: ability to map Courier users to WordPress users, queuing support, and statistics on subscriber base changes.
• A brand new, Django-powered Harvard Crimson launched on 11/10/09 at 8:07 pm.
• In a stroke of amazing luck, Scott Bressler has a few developers building an iPhone application for Student Life. Weigh in with your ideas, and whether it should be open source or closed.
• 5 Ways to find, mix and mash your data - Great resources to use to map information (tks Brian Manzullo)
• Who will pay the messengers? - Copious notes by Max Cutler from four sessions at Yale’s “Journalism and the New Media Ecology” conference. [Max is actually going to do a more thorough write-up shortly]
• Why the mainstream media is dying -Fake Steve Jobs tears into the New York Times regarding the way that they (failed) to cover the Zynga story that TechCrunch broke. Good rebuttal to the “blogs don’t practice journalism” meme (tks Andrew Spittle)
• 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9 - Several exciting additions including the_post_image(), oEmbed support for adding media to posts, and custom post types.

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• A course idea pitched to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University: a journalism entrepreneurship class with a twist. The school would create a corporation that invested in the student’s projects in exchange for 70% ownership. They’d help incubate the business with the eventual goal of selling the successful ones.
• Primer on how to curate content on the web, instead of just moderating user generated content (tks Megan!)
• Four developers make up 25% of the recently-launched Texas Tribune’s staff. This will be a site to watch for sweet projects. (Related - TexasTribune: Our amazing site developers would want us to add– this site could not have been coded in 3 wks without #django.)
• In the forum, Joe Cefoli explains how display the images for Gazette’s media slider after the Javascript loads. Also, Will asks whether a plugin to manage home page templates would be useful. I think it could, but the news organizations need multiple home page templates to begin with. Andrew points out that the news organizations might be more likely to design different homepage templates if it didn’t require technical expertise to switch them on the fly.
• Shameless self-promotion: CoPress had a pretty terrific write-up of our progress to date on Poynter on Monday, and I had the fortune to join Joe Cefoli of The Fairfield Mirror on a WordPress Tavern podcast this week to talk about their migration and relaunch.

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• Columbia Daily Spectacle (UPDATED) – Details on what went down at the Columbia Spectator over last weekend. Frustrated with the leadership of the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, the Online Editor decided to take the site offline until a list of demands had been met.
• WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release – Minor security updates including a fix for a Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently affecting a subset of users. You should probably upgrade as soon as possible.
• What does a mobile journalist need? – Paul Bradshaw streams a class on mobile journalism, and lists hardware, software, systems, and mindset required for mobile journalism. (tks Megan Taylor)
• How To Use Your Custom Yourls Shortener with Tweetie 2 – Simple tutorial on how to use your self-hosted URL shortener with Tweetie 2. Yourls is a slick piece of software for hosting your own URL shortener.
• Jonathan Pichot at the Campus Chronicle is looking for the best plugin for Facebook Connect and any tips for implementation.
• News Orgs Make Gradual Progress in Site Navigation, Use of Social Networks – Ken Sands walks through design considerations of recent changes to the Washington Post, Toronto Star, and Spokesman-Review. Ryan Pitts at the Spokesman-Review seems to be doing the most radical rethink of navigation; it would be interesting to know whether they’re tracking user interaction and iterating based on usage.
• Max Cutler and Robert Baskin have been doing a bit of work on Courant News today, including finishing up powerful search functionality I’ve gotten to take a peak at and building an “elegant way to vary site display based on User-Agent or other HTTP headers.”
• Announcing Managing News: A Pluggable News & Data Aggregator – The code is in open beta and available for download. The key selling point to this product seems to be that you can import data from multiple sources, run persistent searches across the incoming data, and visualize it on a map.

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• Lessons in journalism entrepreneurship from the ONA - Best advice from Om Malik: “Just do it.” Doing it is where you learn.
• A quick primer on making software – best practices, tools and further reading - Version control and defect tracking are probably going to be the newest concepts to the average journalist. Important stuff to know.
• danielbachhuber: News sites need to rethink their approach to navigation. “What gets used more is navigation that is contextually relevant.” #ONAUX #ONA09
• Students are smarter than they get credit for and they need to sell you on that – Young people are smart and deserve credit. The baby boomers need to realize that. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• In the forum, the Mustang Daily has mockups for a new redesign and Ethan Klapper generated a number of ideas for a landing page to curate content around the Dalai Lama’s visit this weekend.
• trobertson: @copress I’m running student-run hyperlocal web site on Joomla. Would like to share ideas, connect and contribute. http://tr.im/xhwC
• My aggregation experience: The Michigan government shutdown – Brian Manzullo explains how curating content when he didn’t have reporters to cover a story still helped engage readers with an important story.
• maxcutler: Advance notice: YDN hosting second annual Business and Online conference weekend of Nov 14. More info and website coming soon
• albertsun: Check out @dailypenn‘s new website, http://thedp.com and congratulate @dget and @emilybabay!

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• On value and valuation - Interesting discussion of the difference between a company or tool’s value and its valuation. Hint, it’s those with the higher value that will have a greater effect on the world (tks Andrew Spittle)
• In the forum, Brian Manzullo introduces an experiment at CM Life to contextualize the discussion around tailgating policy at Central Michigan University.
• Max Cutler is “looking for good examples of sports coverage on college news sites.” Screenshots of the best would make a really good blog post.
• Nameless CMS is running on FIUSM.com, but the public release probably won’t be announced until after the launch of Rails 3.
• The end of objectivity – web 2.0 version – Journalistic objectivity is a phantom. WaPo’s social media policy proves it. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• The Daily Trojan at USC relaunched on WordPress recently and has recommendation functionality that might be worth emulating.
• On September 25, Emily Babay mentioned that the new Daily Pennsylvanian site is almost ready to go.
• Re-Tweet This: ‘Austin American-Statesman’ Tries to Make Money on Twitter – The cost is $150 per ad and they must be “actionable,” or offer discounts, coupons, etc.

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• According to Mathew Ingram, Communities Editor for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, there are things commenters can actually be useful for: fact-checking, new angles to stories, and market research. “The surest way to improve the tone of the debate in forums or comments is to get involved in them.”
• Ten points for each of Brian Manzullo’s five goals for the CM Life website this fall. Other student newspapers should follow his lead and share lessons learned from the experiments. Building “Hot Topic” landing pages is one of the ways you can change up how news is presented, and educate readers with better context.
• Son Hunyh walks through some of the design considerations of relaunching mndaily.com. In my opinion, the category and landing pages are amongst the best in the nation.
• If you on the web today or Sunday, WordCamp Portland is all over Twitter and livestreaming too. There was a great session this morning on speeding up WordPress and Matt Mullenweg showed up at lunch to answer questions from the attendees. WordPress and WordPress MU might become the same software in version 3.0, and BackPress, an abstraction of the WordPress admin, is being used by Automattic in a few projects but has no timeline for release.

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• The Center for Innovation in College Media is now accepting applicants for their fall internship. We’ve worked extensively with Bryan Murley, one of CICM’s directors, and can assure those considering the position that you’ll learn a tremendous amount. The work will primarily focus on producing a variety of editorial content for the weblog, including “podcast interviews with media movers and shakers, reviews of college media online initiatives, and maps and databases of college media online sites.”
• 5 Steps to Increase User Contributions to Your Community Site – Solid synopsis of involving your community from start to finish. Understanding how to incentivize participation, as well as how to foster and educate it, are keys to success. On a related note, Jackie Hai’s new project, PEG Point, is on its way to becoming a highly-recommended read.
• Dan Gillmor has a list of 11 things he’d do if he ran a news organization. Numbers two and three: leverage the intelligence of your community, and make transparency the default. It’s good to see these ideas consolidating; let’s start learning from more experiments.
• andrewspittle: Heading into the first weekend of the @whitmanpio‘s new web-first workflow. Waiting for the first, inevitable quirk or bug.
• Max Cutler is looking for a Web/UX designer to assist in the implementation of Nando, the editorial admin interface for Courant News.

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• Make sure your WordPress site is up to date with 2.8.4, the most recent version. Yesterday afternoon, Lorelle, a significant voice in the WordPress community, reported that older versions were under attack. There are two reported signatures of a hacked blog: funky permalinks including the keywords “eval” or “base64_decode,” or an extra administrator in your database that doesn’t show up in the WordPress admin. The exploit that the hacker is using has been patched for a while, and should only affect those who haven’t updated their site recently. Making sure your WordPress site is up to date is one of the best ways of keeping it secure.
• On a related WordPress note, johnl1479 says: FYI: #PodPress 8.8.1 breaks thumbnail capability of #Wordpress MU 2.8.4a.
• An alumni assesses the recently relaunched Eagle at American University and identifies some of the value it’s offering her. Good ideas that you should pay attention to.
• Andrew Robinson found success adding the Facebook Connect plugin to the WKU Herald website. Facebook apparently only allows one connection at a time, and having the Fan Box Widget on the site as well caused issues.
• Through Twitter, I found out about @WiredResearch, a Twitter account that teases the facts of upcoming articles. It would be way cool to see this on a super-local level.
• VentureBeat has an inside scoop on the editorial workflow of The New York Times blogs. Posts that are ready to go are marked “Pending Review”, and notifications are still by email.
• Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – The web is actually reviving literacy and pushing it in “bold new directions.”

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• The New York Times is leveraging the communication skills of their journalists in an entirely new way: by having them teach. It’s a first-time experiment for the publication that hints at the importance of area expertise for the 21st century journalist. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• Need ideas for reinventing your J school this fall? Suzanne Yada has your back. The best, most pragmatic idea, in my opinion, is hosting a BarCamp. Make it happen.
• In the forum, I’ve released the 0.1 version of a plugin for properly redirecting your old College Publisher URLs to your new WordPress website. It should work with both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 URLs, although the caveat is that I haven’t tested it fully yet, and requires that your old article IDs are stored somewhere in the database (or that they are your new post IDs). Also, Andrew Robinson of the College Heights Herald has done a bit of research into the best plugin for integrating Facebook Connect into your website.
• Rebooting the News, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s podcast loved by everyone (or Joey, Greg, and I at least), had Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab on as a guest this past week. Zach presents a thoughtful, well-informed perspective on the Associated Press’ DRM announcement that caught me completely by surprise, and Jay and Dave conclude the episode with a conversation about the type of information news stories traditionally lack that would actually make the reporting more useful.

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