Five developments on the future of news for the week of June 29-July 3:
No comment ... well, except on Facebook
Sarah Palin shocked everyone by announcing she was stepping down as governor of Alaska a year before her term expires. Circumventing some spotlight, she made the announcement during a quick news conference on the day before Independence Day — when most people were paying attention to barbecues and brews, not news. Dodging the press even more, Palin's statements in the hours and days after the announcement came only to social media sites. The Associated Press, which couldn't find her, was quoting her tweets, and The Washington Post was quoting her Facebook page, where she lambasted the mainstream media:
"The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the 'politics of personal destruction'."
Inside Adrian Holovaty's head
The code behind EveryBlock, the data-driven journalism effort by Adrian Holovaty and five programmers, has been released. Poynter's Regina McCombs points out that journalism programmers everywhere are excited to see what makes EveryBlock — and Holovaty himself — tick. Holovaty brings a lot of interest because he's a computer coder and a journalist who blends the two crafts into successful projects. As a coder, he helped develop Django (a Web application framework for Python). As a journalist, he has worked in the newspaper business at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Lawrence Journal-World and the Washington Post. EveryBlock is the result of a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge Grant. If you have a programmer at your media organization, have him or her take a look at this code — it's now open-source, meaning any organization could use it to build applications.
Live tweeting, we hardly knew ya
Just as news organizations are getting on top of Twitter, could the service already be yesterday's news? Daniel Honigman, a former social media guru at Tribune Interactive, says lifestreaming might be taking its place. (Disclosure - I write for the blog Old Media, New Tricks with Honigman). What the heck is lifestreaming? It's a way to take all of your social media and multimedia efforts and easily post them in one place, and usually the narrative is a running stream of consciousness. So, if a reporter would normally live tweet an event, why not lifestream it, with photos, videos and even audio all in one place?
Revenue for media companies? There might be an app for that
The Wall Street Journal iPhone app is a free product, but that's unlikely to last. Rupert Murdoch has already said the company will charge for the app at some point. If you log into the WSJ iPhone application, you will be asked to take a survey on whether you'd be willing to pay for the app. It doesn't hurt to ask. The Associated Press reported that USA Today's publisher has said that he regrets giving up his paper's app for free. "I'm not sure we realized what we had," said David Hunke. "I think that's a value readers will be willing to pay for."
More on the social media revolution
The Web Ecology Project published a report on how many people have tweeted about the Iranian election and its aftermath in the first 18 days. Mashable's Pete Cashmore breaks down the report, which details the results of more than 2 million Iran-related tweets.
