The Washington Post has launched a new selection of mobile services, including an iPhone-optimized site, a BlackBerry application, and other variations to work on cellphones.
The services use a simplified navigation structure, comprising Politics, Business, Metro, Arts and Lifestyle, and Sports sections.
MediaPost reports that the services were built in-house, and that two editors have been assigned to mobile content. E-commerce functionality, such as restaurant reservations and movie ticket purchasing, are reportedly under development.
Simulated screenshot: washingtonpost.com
Advertising Age reports that stock car racing body Nascar has accredited 28 bloggers and non-mainstream websites to cover races this season.
It seems fewer newspaper sports writers have been turning up in the press boxes as a result of newspaper cutbacks, so Nascar decided it needed a “Citizen Journalist Media Corps” to keep the fans satisfied.
“The last 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen a drop in print media,” says Ramsey Poston, Nascar’s managing director-corporate communications, who oversees the Citizen Journalist project. “We’ve not only lost some of the biggest auto-racing writers in the business due to layoffs and cutbacks — people like Jim Pedley of The Kansas City Star, John Sturbin (of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) and Grant James (of the St. Petersburg Times) — but we’ve lost the papers themselves. We used to get great coverage from the Rocky Mountain (Colo.) News, and now it doesn’t even exist. And other papers are simply cutting back coverage.
Nascar’s communications department reviewed some 30,000 websites before making the final selection, which includes RacinToday.com (pictured).
See also: Fire the sports writers? Not if the teams have anything to say about it
The Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound website this month features essays on the future of journalism.
Clay Shirky kicked things off on Monday reiterating a theme on which he blogged a few months ago - that this is a time of upheaval for traditional news media, with no single clear path to future sustainability.
Today, another journalism professor, Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, responds with five trends he sees emerging from the current chaos. It’s worth reading his full article but, to summarize, the five trends are:
- The marketplace is calling for ever more specialized information. This trend was well established in the second half of the 20th century, and the Internet greatly accelerated it.
- The need for processing is increasing at two levels: in the production stage where analysis and interpretation help readers or listeners make sense of the oversupply of data, and in the transmission stage where information is packaged for ready retrieval by the specialized subsets of the audiences that want it.
- We are starting to place more value on evidence-based versus source-based journalism.
- Dividing journalism into subcategories of specialists has already started a fourth trend: increasing the number of certification programs for journalists.
- The leverage for motivations other than profit is growing rather than shrinking. The low entry costs of the Internet guarantee that.
The series is scheduled to continue with contributions from Paul Starr on July 17 and Steve Yelvington on July 20.
Joe Marchese at MediaPost explains why it’s so hard to get brand advertising onto websites at prices that will appeal to publishers.
…the issue with bringing branding online isn’t with the marketers and agencies, it is with the publisher side, maybe with some help from the marketers, of course ;-). Publishers can create “impressions” simply by adding ad units, but adding ad units don’t magically increase the amount of consumer attention in the world, or even on a given page. What publishers have that is of value to brand advertisers is consumer attention. In order to prove valuable to brand advertisers, publisher must find a way to share their audience’s limited attention with marketers in a FAIR exchange of value.
The question, of course, is how can online publishers increase advertising rates to make up for a reduction in impressions.
The marketer’s role in this is twofold: 1. Don’t force publishers’ hands by arguing both sides. Marketers can’t claim they value the opportunity to guarantee the delivery of a message to consumers, then when presented with such an opportunity, cite the lowest ad network CPM rate they have been quoted for negotiation purposes. 2. Build creative that is meant to be a contained brand experience/engagement. Engagements are not traffic generators. People don’t necessarily want to visit a brand’s website at the drop of a hat…
Marchese argues that publishers and ad networks need to do a better job of defining and delivering value for brand advertisers.
All of the Gawker Media sites have a new commenting system.
As explained on gawker.com, “we the editors are taking control back”.
As a site gets bigger, the comments tend to get busier — and sometimes more annoying. Our titles are no exception. Deadspin’s had to contend with a war between the daytime and nighttime users; Jezebel editors battle for control with a politically-correct mob; perceptions of Gawker are set by a small group of glib and bitchy commenters. All sites that are growing as rapidly as ours have something like this problem — and one that can’t be solved simply by banning the offenders or applying more strictly our approval process.
Editors will grant star status to their most-trusted commenters, whose comments will get greater prominence and who will, in turn, be able to grant prominence to others’ comments they like. (Stars were previously awarded based on how many followers a commenter had.)
Although moderators will continue to monitor the discussion, the stars will have their comments posted without pre-moderation, and will also be able to approve comments submitted by other users.
Commenters can also upload images and YouTube videos.
The Gawker sites are: gawker.com, deadspin, kotaku, jezebel, io9.com, jalopnik, gizmodo and lifehacker.
