Tuesday, September 20, 2005

The Wall Street Journal Goes Tabloid That headlline isn't talking about "tabloid" in the sense of "Batboy Meets Bush, Dow Soars" nonsense, just the smaller tabloid-size newspaper format... but with a subtle "new media" twist. The normally "broadsheet" Wall Street Journal is trying the smaller size in its foreign editions. For pictures, check out Mark Friesen's NewsDesigner.com weblog. (Mark's blog also features links to page-one images from papers around the world, which could come in handy for class discussions about editors' news decisions here and there... and there... and there...) Back to the Journal... a quick look at the new tabloids will show you a "WSJ.com" peeking out from behind the new nameplate at the top of the page. Karen Elliott House, senior vice president of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, calls it "a subtle statement of our continuous, around-the-clock presence." The international editions will offer subscription packages that combine print and 24-hour online access, and the printed paper will point to online data, transcripts, photos and "even video," according to the WSJ story about itself, which, unlike most of http://WSJ.com, is available for free. (Another exception students should know about is http://www.collegejournal.com/, a useful mixture of education- and career-oriented stories, with links to other free features -- and plenty of opportunities to subscribe.) 12:56:58 PM    comment [] Public radio news greatest hits, updated daily The podcasting approach to radio-by-subscription has brought National Public Radio programs to  audiences whose local NPR affiliates don't carry a particular show. The network's main daily news programs still aren't available in online podcast format, but here's a new wrinkle... Blogger George Hotelling points to a podcast I hadn't noticed: NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories, a 1 a.m. program put together from audience choices of NPR stories broadcast during the day. "There is no way NPR could do this without podcasting," George says. "The length of the show can vary wildly...  Podcasting has the power to free shows from the tyranny of the half hour slot." By the way, although Morning Edition and All Things Considered don't podcast their full content, they are available for online listening in real-time. And NPR does have podcast subscription feeds for five-minute morning, afternoon and evening news summaries. See the "News" section of NPR's list of 142 podcasts. 12:30:23 PM    comment [] CNN's innovation situation Wired's Xeni Jardin describes CNN's Situation Room as "something of an R&D lab for news-gathering technology." I haven't seen it yet (no cable), but the program was launched in August and takes its name from  the White House Situation Room and features a variety of multimedia feeds into the live newsroom. "It's like bringing viewers inside our control room and allowing them to move through all of that raw, incoming information with us," is how CNN's Wolf Blitzer described it to Wired News. "We go to a helicopter flying over New Orleans, where they're narrating what they see -- there are people trapped on a roof somewhere," Blitzer said, describing the process. "Then we bring in Tom Forman, who used to be a reporter in New Orleans. We're looking at satellite maps of the city, comparing this with video feeds that come in, then we'll zoom in on Google Earth, see what's nearby -- a university, Lake Pontchartrain -- and all of this together delivers the story in a richer, more immediate way." Hmm. Maybe I'll head for lunch at that sub shop that keeps CNN on all the time. Speaking of new technologies for journalism, Wired has been covering a bunch of them, from Current.tv to podcasting and video blogging. See the "related stories" block of links at the bottom of any of those. 12:09:02 PM    comment [] Computers assist Tennessee reporters Poorer and university neighborhoods supported tax. Lee Ann O'Neal and Ian Demsky of The Tennessean used spreadsheets and mapping software to analyze Nashville's failed Sept. 13 sales tax referendum. They found the greatest support for the half-cent sales tax increase was in poorer neighborhoods and the areas around Vanderbilt and Belmont...[Sept. 19  Extra! Extra! from IRE/NICAR] 11:09:57 AM    comment []

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