Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Top Mass. court: OpenCourt can keep its cameras rolling
- NewsCred wants to be the AP newswire for the 21st century
- How are online media connected in Colombia?
| Top Mass. court: OpenCourt can keep its cameras rolling Posted: 14 Mar 2012 11:13 AM PDT Just in time for Sunshine Week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled in favor of courtroom transparency project OpenCourt and its ability to record and stream online video of public court proceedings.
“This is obviously a good day for OpenCourt,” the project’s executive director, John Davidow, told me. (Full disclosure: Davidow was my news director when I worked at WBUR, the public radio station where OpenCourt is based.) “We felt that it was really an important right for us to fight for in the courts, because as the technology changes going forward, it doesn’t mean that the editorial processes or the rights of the First Amendment change.” OpenCourt was launched with a Knight News Challenge grant in 2010, originally under the name Order in the Court 2.0. The project first turned on its cameras in a Boston-area courtroom in May 2011, but by July, the local district attorney’s office had filed a pair of motions aimed at shutting off the OpenCourt livestream and preventing it from publishing courtroom video to online archives. According to OpenCourt’s timeline of the case, a judge denied the motion to take down the livestream — but she didn’t rule right away on the motion related to archival video. The state then renewed its motions against OpenCourt after a district attorney blurted out the name of an alleged victim, a minor, in a kidnapping case. At that time, the judge ruled to prevent OpenCourt from publishing the video of the blurt. In response, WBUR's lawyers sent a letter to the judge saying that his order violated OpenCourt’s First Amendment rights. OpenCourt said it would have redacted the name of the minor, following standard practice among news organizations. Davidow says that the ruling means that decisions about what to cover will remain in the hands of the public, not the government. But he also says there’s more work to be done to modernize courts coverage, including propagating best practices and better educating the public. “When there are less and less reporters out there to be the bridge to what’s going on in the nation’s courts, there needs to be a way for the public to be informed about how justice is administered in this country,” Davidow said. Here’s the court’s ruling: |
| NewsCred wants to be the AP newswire for the 21st century Posted: 14 Mar 2012 08:17 AM PDT The Associated Press is many things: a giant, globe-spanning news organization; an arbiter of spelling and grammar; a vendor of app platforms; a distributor of other news organizations’ content. It’s that last area where the AP has attracted some of its most vigorous competitors. From ad hoc content-sharing networks to startup-driven cooperatives, a number of businesses have argued that they can use online tools to do a better job of connecting content producers and content consumers. The latest to join that battle is New York startup NewsCred, whose CEO says it can surpass the wire service by being a technology company at heart and by becoming a wire of wires. “The days where you deliver a huge AP wire and there’s a bunch of editors looking at a screen and manually taking articles and publishing them ― I think those days are numbered,” said Shafqat Islam, the NewsCred co-founder and CEO.
Customers can also create their own bundles by assembling a few individual sources. Islam said the price varies depending on the exact bundle, but cited a $3,000-$5,000 per month price for something like its finance bundle. NewsCred shares the revenue with publishers and provides sophisticated analytics for their content. Unlike NewsCred’s competitors, Islam says, his is a technology company at heart. NewsCred ingests data from hundreds of content-management systems and standardizes it, providing a single, well-documented API. The company has developed its own natural language processing technology to parse news copy for keywords and topics. (Human editors refine the results of the algorithms.) Islam said some publishers are even using NewsCred’s API in lieu of their own, relying on the company for heavy lifting on the back end. In fact the current iteration of NewsCred is a solution to the company’s own failed consumer-facing product. NewsCred was launched a few years ago as a customizable news portal. It didn’t take off, Islam said. “What we wanted to do was license content. We wanted to get full text content into our consumer portal. We were ready to pay for it. But it was so damn difficult,” he said. Plus: “The technology was terrible. People didn’t have APIs. We looked around and said, ‘Why are we struggling to build this consumer site when we can just solve these problems?’”
NewsCred is going after two kinds of customers, what Islam categorizes as traditional publishers and brands. In both cases, the customer may not have the resources or expertise to launch a vertical or new website. Take the example of Orange Telecom. “They don’t have editors, they don’t have journalists, but they want to create a compelling experience on their consumer site,” Islam said. “So they license content from us, entertainment content — news articles, reviews, images, videos — and they power this entire entertainment section on their site…without having to go and hire a huge editorial team.” Islam said other new NewsCred clients include Business Insider, Weather Channel, Zurich Insurance, and Condé Nast. Islam said a newspaper might realize some sections are easier to monetize than others — travel, health, weddings — and want to launch a new section quickly. (Remember how USA Today partnered with Demand Media to generate cheap content for its travel section.) There are similar-but-different outfits in this space. The biggest competitor is NewsRight — itself spun off from the AP — which announced today it will license content from 29 major news companies to customers of Moreover Technologies (remember them?) — its first major deal. Publish2, not quite a startup any more, also has a few mainstream media partnerships and has spoken with braggadocio of becoming “The New AP” — a model that doesn’t seem to have taken off. (And, of course, the AP is hardly standing still.) Islam said NewsCred is not in the business of tracking down over-aggregators and content thieves, the posture the AP adopted for a time with its News Licensing Group, the precursor to NewsRight. “We have absolutely no plans to become a litigation shop,” Islam said. (NewsRight CEO David Westin said the same thing about his company in January.) “Our focus is on, ‘How do we help these content providers get more distribution? How do we help our clients get the best content?’” Islam said. “So it’s really more of a carrot play than the stick.” |
| How are online media connected in Colombia? Posted: 14 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PDT
And it turns out, we now have one, at least for Colombia. A collection of journalism and media organizations in Colombia have finished what they believe is the first comprehensive study that shows who the players are in online media, how they operate, and the ways these different sites are all connected. The report, “Periodismo digital en Colombia: El quien y el comma de los nuevos medios” (“Digital journalism in Colombia: The who and how of new media” — it’s in Spanish), surveys nearly 400 media sites from around the country to learn more about their production, coverage areas, and perhaps most importantly, business plans. The creators of the report, including current Nieman Fellow Carlos Eduardo Huertas, see the study as the first real map of online media in the country. It’s also a glimpse at how, as many differences as there are among media around the world, some things are universal. For instance, you won’t be surprised to learn that Colombian media rely on social media to drive traffic to content, with the majority of sites having presences on YouTube and Facebook (just edging out Twitter 58 percent to 56 percent). So what else we know? For starters, 74 percent of the websites in the survey launched between 2001 and 2010. Of course that in some ways mirrors the U.S., where incumbent newspapers, magazines and TV stations had a presence on the web in the 90s, but real growth of online news took place in the last decade. In the Colombian survey, the majority of sites are still tied to traditional outlets — 88 of the 391 sites (22 percent) are online-only organizations. Colombian outlets have the same issues with generating digital revenue as the U.S. counterparts. The report says online advertising remains an elusive target for news sites, with many organizations relying on subscription dollars as well as revenue from training programs. (One interesting tidbit: 67 percent of the sites were launched with less than 5 million pesos, which is roughly US$2,800.) One of the most fascinating parts of the report is that it shows the connections between the various media outlets, essentially illustrating the role each plays on a macro and micro level. While much of online media is concentrated in the capital of Bogota, sites also cover areas like Antioquia, Vall de Cauca, and Santander, with a focus that you could probably call (hyper)local. At a broader level, what the report shows is that many of these sites, whether local, national, or niche, share a level of interconnectedness. For example, El Tiempo, the country’s largest newspaper, acts as a kind of hub for daily general news, while La Silla Vacía (founded by ex-Nieman Fellow Juanita León) is the facilitator of government and politics news. The report is well worth looking (make sure you brush up on your Spanish or have good translation software) at if you’ve got an interest in the growth of online media in Colombia or Latin America and what commonalities exist between the U.S. media and the rest of the world. |
The decision means that OpenCourt can continue to do what it set out to do since its inception, despite the 
The company has licensed content from an impressive 750 providers — the AP among them — covering a healthy share of the world’s major English-language news brands. NewsCred clients can subscribe to bundles of content assembled from those individual sources; for instance, the 
Online-native news operations share a dependent, interconnected relationship with one other, linking, excerpting, and building on one another’s work. It’s that structure that lends itself to people using terms like “ecosystem” when they talk about the state of online media. But if I remember my high school biology right, most ecosystems are clearly defined by their borders and the species and subspecies that live within them. We need a chart. Or at least a good map.| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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