Every week we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed while you were working for Newt.
- The only plausible explanation for this absurdly-titled column by New York Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane is simply this: He’s trolling for a response in the style of the great master-troll Bill Keller.
Jay Rosen’s explanation: It proves just how deep the “view from nowhere” has penetrated into American journalism.
- After a column in which the Washington Post ombudsman asked whether the publication was “innovating too fast,” Joshua Hatch says, “It’s not how fast something is done, it’s how well.” Quality of ideas and execution are key:
Discussing whether news organizations should or shouldn’t innovate is silly and pointless. Of course they should. Every industry must. The conversation needs to be about making smart choices and maintaining standards, and how to do that in a challenging business and technological environment.
Related: Are all newspaper ombudsmen high?
- Also on the innovation front, Groupon has unveiled “Clicky,” the clickable value-wheel:
The company invites players to sign in with their Facebook account and then spin the wheel to potentially score a discount on select Groupons ($5, $10, $50 or $100).
- By offering its readers free cover photos for Facebook’s new timeline format, the Baltimore Sun is reaching out to its social media audience in a smart way, says Charles Apple:
Facebook users need horizontal pictures and they’d love to get ahold of professional-quality shots of their city or local tourist attractions or their local football stadium. Meanwhile, we have archives overflowing with nice pictures of those very things. And visuals pros who can easily crop the pictures into the correct proportions and resolution.
- Google made yet another change to its search function by adding “personal results,” or items that have been shared by people within your social network. The only problem? It only includes items that were shared on Google Plus:
Google Plus may have more than 65 million users, but for a lot of people, it’s not yet where their friends are doing their real sharing. They’re doing it on Facebook and Twitter. But Search Plus Your World doesn’t spotlight those shares in anything like the same way it does Google Plus posts.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter isn’t very happy about this development.
- “The days of wasting people’s time with 1,000 words about a record that we don’t even think is good is over,” says SPIN senior editor Chris Weingarten. A majority of SPIN‘s album reviews are being exiled from the print edition and will instead appear in 140-character tweets from the account @SPINreviews.
- Why authors tweet.
- AdAge found that a third of all magazine and newspaper iPad apps have serious bugs:
The biggest issue revolves around authenticating print subscribers … But there are a host of other issues as well. Pages, video and audio can fail to load. Links may be broken. Audio sometimes won’t turn off, leaving users the choice of closing the app or continuing to listen against their will. Spontaneous crashes are common. Downloads continue to be a problem with many apps, particularly when consumers want to download issues over a 3G network or without high-speed connections.
- Digital video ad spending in the U.S. is expected to hit $5 billion by 2016.
- Daily deal sites are pulling back their web ad spending, with portal sites such as Yahoo and AOL taking the biggest hits.
- 10 reasons why Groupon is terrible for merchants.
- The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Daily Deal Sites.
- AOL’s Patch sites have tripled their web traffic year-over-year, however that hasn’t translated to meaningful revenue just yet.
- A survey by the National Newspaper Association found that readers prefer community papers as their source of local news and advertising.
- Romenesko has the deets on the impending Gannett paywall.
- Gawker is auditioning writers for its night and weekend shifts and allowing commenters to weigh in on which writers they like or loathe.
- Commenters using pseudonyms leave higher quality comments than commenters using their real names, according to a recent analysis by Disqus.
- What BuzzFeed’s new politics team is doing right.
- WordPress has joined the fight against SOPA/PIPA.
- And finally, via the fine folks at The Stranger, here’s an innovation that’s all but certain to revolutionize the newspaper industry — The Page Turner:
