A terrific new gallery of infographics and interactive design from the New York Times shows how interesting data visualizations and features increase the time readers spent on their site. And it makes their ads more valuable; interesting design is good business.
The generous genius behind San Francisco’s best annual live music festival– Hardly, Strictly Bluegrass– is bringing his cash and his penchant for goodwill problem solving to the dilemma of how to fix local news in San Francisco. Warren Hellman is creating a nonprofit news organization in partnership with KQED, UC Berkeley journalism school and the New York Times.
The plan is to create a multi-media group that will link reporters and editors, KQED’s TV, radio and online capabilities, UC Berkeley’s journalism school’s expertise and the New York Times as the partnership’s “print distribution agent,”
–Noelle Leca, chair of KQED’s board of directors, told the San Francisco Business Times. The launch is set for early 2010.
Google has just rolled out a preview of Fast Flip, a new visual way to browse the news. Once you sign in with your Google login, you can flip between readable cached images of news articles without having to wait for them to load. The experience is close to flipping pages in a magazine and over time the site will learn the sites you like. The fast flipping between stories also plays well with iPhones. One significant aspect is the partnership with the three dozen or so news sites and blogs that are partners in the site– the publishers will get a share of the revenue from ads shown near their content. Maybe this is the Hulu for newspapers. Read more and see video of the product introduction.
I’ve been checking out the exceptional web content of Good magazine more and more lately. And the thing that always pulls me in first is the terrific infographics, they’re usually creative, interesting and fun to look at. Now you can see the entire collection in a Flickr set that gets new updates each Tuesday. The L.A.-based magazine was founded two and a half years ago by Ben Goldhirsh, son of the late founder of Inc. magazine, Bernie Goldhirsh, and it donates its subscription fees entirely to charity.
Some nights you just wish you had a few more minutes to stare into the inky-black depths of Jim Lehrer’s doe-y eyes. And now it’s gotten easier as PBS has launched a new video portal for lots of their full-length programs and documentary series. Get that kettlecorn ready for that 3-hour documentary on Nixon.
There’s a new guide in town. From the good people who brought you The Onion and their A.V. Club, comes a new food, music and nightlife guide to San Francisco. Decider’s already conquering eight other U.S. cities with its good balance of listings and features. And with Yelp’s clueless-d-bag to knowledgeable-insider ratio climbing everyday, Decider may have shown up just at the right time. I’m especially fond of The Drink Finder, which is probably one of the best Google Map guides for drinking available.
It looks like there might be one more gasp of intelligent life in the rattling death spiral that is broadcast television. Kings is great stuff and it’s on NBC. I have no idea when it’s on tv, but who cares when you can watch ‘em two at a time on Hulu.
While tv news continues to lose viewers and fewer people even care about their dying local newspapers, it makes you wonder where people are actually getting their news. From the radio, it seems. National Public Radio’s audience has nearly doubled since 1999. And Fast Company has a great article that tries to explain NPR’s phenomenal growth, saying the if the network can successfully deal with the politics of its local affiliates, the network’s national reach, non-profit structure and digital savvy, might just save the news business.
Its programming now reaches 26.4 million listeners weekly — far more than USA Today’s 2.3 million daily circ or Fox News’ 2.8 million prime-time audience. When newspapers were closing bureaus, NPR was opening them, and now runs 38 around the world, better than CNN. It has 860 member stations — “boots on the ground in every town” that no newspaper or TV network can claim.
And with the recent appointment of Vivian Schiller- the former general manager of NYTimes.com- as the new CEO, NPR will probably continue to expand its already robust web and mobile products.
Starting at midnight tonight The New York Times is giving up on TimesSelect and will stop charging for parts of its online content. . The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.. According to the paper, future ad revenue generated by the newly-freed content is expected to exceed the $10 million a year in revenue TimesSelect was producing.
After Stephen Colbert’s amazing performance at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the association is taking no chances this year and has hired 69-year old comedian Rich Little as host.