Nine newspapers in top 20 US news sites

August's Nielsen NetRatings figures for US news sites still show a healthy newspaper presence. The figures below also show the average monthly time spent at a site by consumer.

	Unique visitors	Time per person
CNN General News	18.6 million	24 mins 37 secs
MSNBC	17.4 million	28 mins 11 secs
Yahoo! News	15.2 million	20 mins 48 secs
New York Times	11 million	34 mins 13 secs
USA Today	9.4 million	12 mins 05 secs
ABC News	9.1 million	12 mins 16 secs
Gannett	7.6 million	15 mins 00 secs
Washington Post	5.5 million	20 mins 37 secs
Time Magazine	5.4 million	06 mins 40 secs
IBS	5.3 million	17 mins 03 secs
MSN Slate	5 million	11 mins 21 secs
Hearst	3.8 million	28 mins 08 secs
Fox News	3 million	34 mins 56 secs
LA Times	2.3 million	15 mins 21 secs
New York Post	2 million	16 mins 06 secs
Cox Newspapers	2 million	21 mins 01 secs
AOL News	2 million	08 mins 32 secs
Belo	1.9 million	19 mins 17 secs
Associated Press	1.9 million	06 mins 00 secs
Drudge Report	1.7 million	37 mins 41 secs

(From Editor & Publisher)

OSX is boosting InDesign

The current Apple/Adobe promotion (shipping InDesign free with new PowerMacs), coupled with Quark's likely failure to release an OSX version of XPress prior to Apple shipping OSX-only hardware, is giving a real boost to Adobe's attempt to make inroads into Quark's market share, according to market analysts.
(From C:Net)

Mac will only run OS X + Classic from January

Apple announced at Seybold that hardware release from January 2003 onwards will only boot into OSX. Pre-OS X applications (such as QuarkXPress) will only run in the Classic environment. And if they don't work in Classic, they won't work at all
(From Apple)

URLs in letter cross-refs

Steve Outing has echoed one of my personal hobbyhorses in E-Media Tidbits: print URLs of original stories on letters (and corrects & clarifications). Two points: 1, you'd have to use a service like TinyURL to provide nice, short URLs that people can type (unlike our Vignette monstrosities); 2, if you run cross-refs in Corrections and Clarifications, how does this affect the policy pertaining to the original story online? Do you append the correction to the bottom? Do you correct the story? How do you tackle repeated corrections? And what of those cases where you're legally obligated to remove the story altgether?
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Do not pass Go

Playing computer games - both in public and in private - has been outlawed in Greece. I'm moving there.
(From Kuro5hin)

Progress with microdisplays

Ohio State University has been conducting some tests with a bunch of new "near-eye displays" - eye glasses with built-in computer monitors that can carry as much information as a full-size computer screen. A bit daft in the office, but could be useful for the hack on the move (and in many non-media applications). No sign yet when these things might make it to market, but they seem to be ironing out some of the nasty side-effects ("headache, eyestrain, sore or irritated eyes, blurry vision, dizziness, nausea, disorientation, neck ache, backache")...
(From Science Daily)

A plan for spam

Essay by Paul Graham on how he uses a Bayesian statistical approach to decide whether an email is or is not spam. The method filters each user's email based on the correspondence (both spam and non-spam) that that user receives - so words that some would regard as spammy, but that others would not, are judged in context to the user's usual correspondence. Graham's filter lets through fewer than 5 spams per 1,000 messages, with zero false positives. A good lesson here for commercial spam filters?
(From Tidbits)

Are web shells changing journalism?

Interesting (well, I thought it was interesting) essay on web shells in OJR. Web shells are the navigation surrounding a story, linking to related data, resource, sidebars, backgrounders, archived stories etc. Delivering a good web shell takes you straight to the keyword/autonomy/etc debate about how you identify the context of a story. I have a problem with keywords because the context of a story changes over time: simply chucking a story about Imran Khan in the "cricket" folder might have seemed OK 20 years ago, but that story could now have an entirely different relevance now. The question with web shells is: do you build them from the story (very labour intensive: do you keep going back through your archive and putting new links to old stories?) or from the subject (restrictive: 50 stories in a subject folder X won't necessarily fit when the subject "evolves" into Y). Then there's the question of context over time: should you "snapshot" the web shell around an archived story to show the context as it stood at the time; or should you always show what you reckon to be the context now, rather than then?
(From Online Journalism Review)