Washington Post stories in WSJ Europe/Asia

The Washington Post has made a deal with Dow Jones to run WP stories in the Wall Street Journal Europe and the Wall Street Journal Asia. The move follows the New York Times's buyout of the International Herald Tribune.
(From Washington Post)

Gillmor on "We Media"

Dan Gillmor on a subject the online journalism community loves to chatter about almost more than any other: collaboration with the audience. It takes many forms: from the hysteria over weblogs to the obsession with some naive concept of "community". Gillmor is using the phrase "We Media": "Journalism is evolving away from its lecture mode -- here's the news, and you buy it or you don't -- to include a conversation ... our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves." Gillmor is right of course, and transparency is hardly a bad thing, but hoping for an information democracy is fanciful. Self-selecting communities -- consisting of the bolshiest, best resourced chunks of a potential audience -- are hardly authoritative by definition.
(From Columbia Journalism Review)

IHT move marks "integrated NYT report"

Article by the New York Times's David Kirkpatrick in the International Herald Tribune marking the first issue under the sole ownership of the NYT. Coverage from other papers such as the Washington Post will be reduced. The IHT's executive editor, Howell Raines, says the company is moving toward "a kind of integrated New York Times report that is carried in a variety of media, including the International Herald Tribune". This will have a big impact on the way the company works: "Our journalistic clock will change. We will be a more 24-hour news-gathering organisation." Forrie corries will be expected to meet local deadlines in addition to those of the NYT, and all staff may have to file multiple versions of stories to meet serial deadlines for different time zones (e.g. Paris for IHT, New York for NYT). Furthermore nytimes.com will eventually draw on IHT content to provide 24-hour coverage.
(From International Herald Tribune)

Back to History

Good little debate on Slashdot on the ubiquitous browser Back button. One poster remarks, Back is "almost the only software feature in existence that is universally understood". But does it really do what you want? "Back" really functions as taking the user "up" the directory tree, whereas people perhaps expect it to be "previous".
(From Slashdot)

Moral compass of the internet

Wired bio of Sergey Brin, founder of Google and its head policymaker. Brin tackles issues such as the Church of Scientology's position on criticism, China's recent Google lock-out, racist or inflammatory websites, and companies' attempts to optimise their ranking. In steering the wired world's zeitgeist he could be regarded as one of the most powerful non-governmental influences on world culture and politics. Interesting to hear that his favoured value term is "useful".
(From Wired)

Apple drop X-only January plan

Apple have abandoned their plan to sell only Macs that boot in OS X from January. Report has the usual Quark waffle.
(From CNET News.Com)

IBM chip suits Apple

IBM have confirmed that their new 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip is AltiVec-compatible, which, I'm told, is good news for those who reckon Apple will start using it.
(From MacNN)

Service providers: 1 in 10 jobs now from InDesign

A pretty extensive voxpop survey by Jim Dalrymple on what people think of the QuarkXPress/AdobeInDesign battle. Adobe has made significant gains since InDesign 2.0 (up 188% year on year), and service providers say the number of jobs they receive from InDesign files has gone from 1 in 100 to 1 in 10. But he reckons this success will slow considerably when XPress for OS X finally ships. Quark's Glen Turpin is still sticking to the "we're going to make it solid, not sexy" line. What would be really interesting would be to see how fast XPress will be.
(From MacCentral)

IT projects usually fail -- KPMG

Gulp. A KPMG survey of 134 companies worldwide found that 56 per cent have had to write off as a failure at least one IT project in the past year. The average loss incurreed: 12.5 million euros. Sixty-seven per cent reckoned that their project management function was in need of improvement. A principal reason for failure: poor communication.
(From The Register)

BBC still by far the most popular UK news website

Latest Nielsen NetRatings stats for online news sites here. In October the BBC copped 2.8 million unique viewers; the Guardian 1.3 million, CNN 0.65 million; Ananova 0.5 million; the Telegraph 0.48 million; the FT 0.47 million, and the Sun 0.46 million. The BBC has by far the longest average time per month at 55 minutes.

El Pais now a paid site

El Pais began charging for most of its content Monday November 19. There are two payment options: an annual fee of €80 or a biannual fee of €50. There is also a micropayment option of 0.5 euros for a PDF or 0.2 euros for an html article.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Clarín produces electronic edition

The Argentinian daily Clarín is running a free digital edition using the facsimile page pane, HTML-optimised story pane model. It's pretty impressive, and includes an "other stories" list at the end of each story, No PDFs so far as I can see. See also discussion on Metafilter.
(From Metafilter)

FT, Slate doing trials with tablet PC

The Financial Times, Forbes, the New Yorker, Slate, Les Echoes and Wirtschafts Woche have signed deals with Microsoft to develop tools to publish trial tablet PC magazines. They are hoping to have something usable some time in 2003. Despite the limited take-up of ebooks, the publishers hope to appeal to advertisers for similar reasons: the familiarity and acceptance of print display ads plus the interactivity and personalisation opportunities of electronic publishing. Meanwhile digital edition software company has announced a reader application for tablet PC.
(From CNet News.Com)

When good interfaces go crufty

Interesting essay on "cruft" -- interface conventions that harken back to redundant necessities -- by one Matthew Thomas on his weblog, plus some discussion on Slashdot. Lots of nods to Isys Information Architect's Interface Hall of Shame, home of our favourite Lotus Notes review.
(From Slashdot)

Link farm front pages need to consider Google page design

I've got to agree with Steve Outing on this. News websites just haven't learnt enough from print or TV as regards what to do with their front pages. The headlines before a news programme, or the items on a broadsheet newspaper front page, will rarely stretch beyond 10 items (generic indexes excluded). Even with all the other furniture counted on a newspaper front page, you'll never be taken in more than about 20 different directions. Same goes for Google. Compare that to the Washington Post: 217 links on its front page. Does anyone really scroll down on front pages? I'm not against bundling stories in drop-down menus and leaving the very best editorial picks on the front. Show the quality -- everyone knows there's quantity online.
(From Editor & Publisher)