Canadians miss out on some of the great online video options available south of the border (e.g. hulu. com, abc.com), but this week brought something to ease our frustration.
The National Film Board has posted 700 films on its website where they can be viewed in full, for free.
It’s a great move, considering the tremendous quality of the work and the modest exposure it tends to get.
Most are documentaries, and the NFB says it will be adding more films every week.
On launch day last Wednesday the website’s servers were overloaded, but things have reportedly settled down now.
The NFB is using the open-source Pyro video player API for Flash, from Turbulent Web Development in Montreal.
Research and development departments are not something one generally associates with newspaper companies - even those that have remodelled themselves as multi-channel news companies.
But at the New York Times, Nick Bilton leads a team designing technologies “that will become commonplace in a 24-48-month time frame.” Another sign that the Times is investing now for a post-print future.
Emily Nussbaum, in a January 11 piece in New York Magazine, provides a glimpse into Bilton’s research lab as well as the organizational attitudes and decision-making that enable nytimes.com to produce such ground-breaking features as the US Election Word Train.
Read this article for inspiration.
Writing in the current issue of the Atlantic under the stark headline End Times, Michael Hirschorn warns that the newspaper industry’s transition to a digital business model will be neither smooth, comfortable nor leisurely.
2009 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for the industry as it contends with shrinking advertising revenues in its print editions, the migration of readers to the internet, high debt loads and the sudden onset of a global economic recession.
Hirschorn regards the position of the New York Times as particularly perilous, as the company needs to find US$400 million by May in order to avoid defaulting on part of its US$1 billion debt load.
Not everyone agrees that the Times situation is quite so dire. But Hirschorn still makes some interesting conjectures on how newspapers such as the Times can best succeed in a post-print world:
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Growing up immersed in the environmental movement of the 1970s, my thinking on economics was definitely shaped by concepts such as resource sustainability and limits to growth.
Then came the 1980s and 1990s, when western societies seemed to reject such ideas as hopelessly naive, assuming instead that limitless growth was not only possible but essential to preserve our standard of living.
But the idea of living within the resources provided by Earth hasn’t disappeared altogether, as environmental writer Peter Gorrie explains at thestar.com.
Gorrie interviewed Peter Victor, a senior economist at York University and author of Managing Without Growth.
…Victor and others say the focus on growth diminishes us, largely because two-thirds of our economy is based on consumer spending: If we don’t work and earn so we can keep stuff flying off store shelves and into ever-larger homes, our industrial machine sputters and wheezes. Other important aspects of life – family, friends, relaxation, contemplation, health, hobbies and interests – are trampled in the mad frenzy to ensure the wheel stays spinning.
It’s a good read, and a timely alternative view when we are being urged to consume more to restore our ailing economic system.
One of the best things I’ve read over these recent holidays as been the Content Strategy feature published in mid December by A List Apart.
I particularly like Kristina Halvorson’s summary of content strategy as a discipline. Her suggestions are just as useful to editors at online news services as they are to information architects, marketers and others involved in the broad field of web content strategy.
Halvorson writes:
At its best, a content strategy defines:
- key themes and messages,
- recommended topics,
- content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements),
- content gap analysis,
- metadata frameworks and related content attributes,
- search engine optimization (SEO), and
- implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.
She goes on to describe various content-related disciplines need to support a Content Strategy, namely Editorial Strategy, Web Writing, Metadata Strategy, Search Engine Optimization, Content Management Strategy and Content Channel Distribution Strategy.
Lucky is the organization that can afford individual experts in each of the above areas. But all are essential and, as Hallvorson argues, ripe for greater recognition in the web publishing world:
Dealing with content is messy. It’s complicated, it’s painful, and it’s expensive.
And yet, the web is content. Content is the web. It deserves our time and attention.
For those of us leading online news services, content is where it all begins. Without a clear and rational content strategy, no amount of marketing or Web 2.0 enabling has a chance of success.
Staff of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver continue their online campaign to save the newspaper from closure if a buyer doesn’t come forward by the middle of this month.
Among the personal stories of Rocky staff and the testimonials from loyal readers at the I Want My Rocky blog are four requests from the paper’s staff to their readers:
- Send a letter to a member Colorado’s congressional delegation to ask that Department of Justice ensure that this process adheres to the spirit and the letter of the Newspaper Preservation Act.
- Send a letter to the members on the board of E.W. Scripps (owner of the Rocky Mountain News) reminding them how much you value your newspaper.
- Leave a comment on any of our blog posts, send us an email or a letter telling us what the loss of the Rocky Mountain News would mean to you.
And the one that is the most important — but perhaps the least likely to happen in this day and age:
Happy New Year everyone and, if you’re a reader of the Toronto Star’s print edition, yes it is 2009 even though this morning’s newspaper might have had you checking the calendar for a moment.
The front page of today’s Star features the iconic blue ribbon nameplate which had been removed in a 2007 redesign.
John Cruickshank, the former head of CBC English language news who starts his job as Star publisher today, tells readers in a front-page column that the return of the blue ribbon is “a sign of the renewal of our historic editorial mission and as a symbol of our continuing commitment to our print and online readers in Greater Toronto, across Canada and around the world.”
