Toluu

the exploding newsroom

by john hassell

What news organizations can learn from the Obama campaign (mobile edition)November 16 2008

(This is my latest contribution to the Carnival of Journalism, which is hosted this month by Adam Tinworth. The question before the house this time is what news orgs can learn from the Obama campaign’s use of digital tools in the 2008 campaign. Adam is collecting the responses here.)

As my fellow carnival barkers already know, I think newsrooms can learn a lot from politics, especially at the local level. It’s all about community organizing, and the Obama campaign excelled at using targeted SMS and email messages and social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to build and mobilize a community of supporters nationwide.

I’d expand on this, but I don’t really have anything substantive to add to Jack Lail’s excellent Carnival entry. Instead, I find myself wondering how local news organizations can build on the Obama campaign’s use of mobile services (SMS, Twitter, etc.) to deepen the relationship with local communities.

As Jack rightly suggests, news organizations should be “aggressively growing (thei

The present and the future (?) of online advertisingNovember 16 2008

Two items in the RSS reader caught my eye this morning.

The first comes from Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch, who reports that online advertising — at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — slowed to a near-standstill in the third quarter. “The combined ad revenues of those four Web bellwethers eked out only 0.6 percent growth, quarter over quarter,” Schonfeld writes.

The second comes from VC Fred Wilson, who suggests a path forward for Google in the area of hyperlocal advertising. The short version: Give every business its own landing page, with the ability to assign it a domain, skin it and further customize it.

The problem, as Wilson sees it, is that it’s hard for local news organizations and others in the local advertising space to sell cost-per-click ads to small businesses that have no websites for the ads to link to. “The local ad agencies and local oriented web services are happy to create a web presence for local merchants, but they are often poorly designed and there’s no standardization of them,” he notes.

Wilson concludes like this:

Google should be the yellow pages of the internet. They are already. But they aren’t doing enough for the local merchant

How the newspapers saw itNovember 5 2008

The Huffington Post has a terrific slideshow showing the front pages of 21 newspapers.

It’s not embeddable, but you can see it here.

Here’s the Star-Ledger front page, which isn’t included but captures the moment as well as any of them:

Election Night, as seen on the webNovember 5 2008

Cool slideshow from Sarah Perez of Read/Write Web showing capturing the experience of watching the results on the web last night:

Some nifty Election Night resourcesNovember 4 2008

There are plenty of places to get results and analysis tonight, but there are also some alternatives out there offering different ways of visualizing what’s going on through data, video and photography.

Here’s a random sampling I found in my Google Reader and shared on my link blog:

-Twitter’s Vote Report provides a river of election-related tweets and maps them. (Thanks, Mindy McAdams.)

-An Orange America (sponsored by Tropicana/Pepsi Co.) is a data visualization project that shows the frequency and context of election-related tweets. (Thanks, Jack Lail.)

-Persptv pulls together the latest from polls, news sites, blogs and Twitter. (Thanks, TechCrunch.)

-Flickr has a steadily updated slideshow of photos using the tag