Shameless promotion: Now if all this source would have been linked with rel=”source”. How easy and transparent would all this have been.

Whenever we debate the future of newspapers, inevitably someone asks, “if they go out of business, where will blogs get their stories?” That’s a companion argument to “who will conduct investigative journalism”? Well, just as a wide range of journalistic enterprises are conducting investigative reporting (including online news outlets, television stations, and advocacy groups), so too will we get our news from a variety of different sources. In fact, we already do.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see where the news we discuss on this site came from the past week, from Monday, April 6, to Sunday, April 12. If we linked to a source that got its information from another site, we followed the links until we got to the original source of the reporting (“secondary” source). In other words, I wanted to categorize the original source of information for every (front page) post on the site. Here’s the results of that link inventory:

Newspapers: 102 primary, 21 secondary

Blogs: 83 primary, 19 secondary

Advocacy organizations: 77 primary, 9 secondary

Television network: 69 primary, 14 secondary

Online news organizations: 54 primary, 5 secondary

Magazines and journals: 36 primary

Political trade press: 28 primary

Research/polling: 20 primary

Wikipedia: 21 primary, 8 secondary

Educational (.edu): 15 primary

Government: 14 primary, 5 secondary

Campaigns: 13 primary

Books: 6 primary

AP and other Wire: 5 secondary

Radio: 4 primary

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

Latency Facts from a Data Mining Study at Stanford

A quote from Radar Theme: Web Ops – O’Reilly Radar :

It has been reported that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit. Every company whose web site drives their business is in the same situation, they just don’t know it yet.

You can find the presentation reporting this fact over here (.ppt).

“I don’t believe it’s fair to hold me to the sentence that I expressed six months ago.

I don’t know that anybody has a frame of reference on advertising revenue destruction that, in effect, is as bad as this, going all the way back to the Depression.

So I think the circumstances are dramatically worse than anyone could have possibly predicted.”

We believe that linking to useful websites doesn’t “leak” traffic – quite the opposite in fact. Offering useful links actually makes visitors more likely to return to see what other interesting websites they might find in the future, a model that sites such as Digg and Fark are built around.

Of course as a blogger it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the fact that mainstream media websites are, with the exception of the BBC, business entities with shareholders and an obligation to maximise profits. It’s understandable that they are reluctant to send valuable page views elsewhere. We spent some time researching the issue to see if there was a correlation between the frequency a site links out and the number of links it gets in return.

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The resulting figure of 0.842733801 shows that in general there is a strong relationship between news websites linking out and getting links in return.

In accordance with the Django 1.0 release roadmap, tonight we’ve released the first “alpha” testing version of Django 1.0. This release includes all of the major features due for inclusion in the final Django 1.0, though some lower-priority items are still scheduled to be included before the 1.0 feature freeze, which will occur with the first beta release next month.

We’re live! WordPress for iPhone just launched on the App Store. Download it now and get to blogging. We’ll have more information about the project and how you can contribute soon.

We get a lot of feedback on Google Code and one of the biggest requests have been for feeds (as you can see in issue 8, issue 131, or issue 190). Therefore, I’m happy to announce that we now have Atom feed available for you to track issues, downloads, Subversion changes, and Wiki updates.

• The majority of newspapers are now suffering cutbacks in staffing, and even more in the amount of news, or newshole, they offer the public. The forces buffeting the industry continue to affect larger metro newspapers to a far greater extent than smaller ones. In some cases, these differences are so stark it seems that larger and smaller newspapers are living two distinctly different experiences. Fully 85% of the dailies surveyed with circulations over 100,000 have cut newsroom staff in the last three years, while only 52% of smaller papers reported cuts. Recent announcements of a further round of newsroom staff reductions at large papers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, indicates these differences may be widening further. Our survey found that more than half of the editors at larger papers and a third at smaller ones expect more cutbacks in the next year. But a weaker-than-expected economic performance during the first half of 2008 and grimmer forecasts for the rest of the year suggest some of those cutbacks have already been implemented and darken these projections even further.
• Papers both large and small have reduced the space, resources and commitment devoted to a range of topics. At the top of that list, nearly two thirds of papers surveyed have cut back on foreign news, over half have trimmed national news and more than a third have reduced business coverage. In effect, America’s newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads.
• The culture of the daily newspaper newsroom is also changing. New job demands are drawing a generation of young, versatile, tech-savvy, high-energy staff as financial pressures drive out higher-salaried veteran reporters and editors. Newsroom executives say the infusion of new blood has brought with it a new competitive energy, but they also cite the departure of veteran journalists, along with the talent, wisdom and institutional memory they hold as their single greatest loss. Clearly stretched to describe what is unfolding in their newsrooms, editors use words like, “exciting,” “extraordinary,” “nerve-wracking” and “tumultuous.”
• Newspaper websites are increasingly a source of hope but also of fear. Editors feel torn between the advantages the web offers and the energy it consumes to produce material often of limited or even questionable value. A plurality of editors (48%), for instance, say they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards. Yet a similar plurality (43%) thinks “web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of as newspaper newsrooms.”

As referenced in yesterday’s post, we launched our new API today. To find the API, you can either go directly to http://www.npr.org/api/ or you can follow the new link called “Tools / API” on the NPR.org left nav under the Services section.

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There were quite a few questions that we addressed when developing the API, but one thing that was not really in question was the need to open as much of our content as possible. As a result, almost everything that you can find on NPR.org that we have the rights to redistribute is available through the API. This includes audio, images, full text, etc. That said, there are elements, series and programs that we could not offer due to rights restrictions.

The 2008 results surprised me, as they did last time in 2006. Why aren’t they much worse, when the imminent demise of newspapers seems to be all we ever hear about?

The short answer is that reading customers aren’t deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are. That is no consolation for newspaper company employees who are losing their jobs, and it’s a challenge, to say the least, for a smaller staff to produce, sell and deliver a high-quality local news report for the people who want it.

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As well as (pleasantly) surprising me, some of the results disappointed me, especially in respect to Web sites. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect frequent and intense use of a newspaper’s main site by a large proportion of the population. There are too many other goodies on the Web. There are many other sites that “own” categories like national and international news, sports and business, lifestyle or entertainment. A significant proportion of locals don’t care much about local news, at least not enough to seek out regular doses of it.

Fournier is a main engine in a high-stakes experiment at the 162-year old wire to move from its signature neutral and detached tone to an aggressive, plain-spoken style of writing that Fournier often describes as “cutting through the clutter.”

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A dispatch Fournier filed in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina began: “The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent’s identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn’t match the public’s view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.”

Fournier cited the article in an essay titled “Accountability Journalism: Liberating reporters and the truth” he wrote for the June 1 issue of the AP’s internal newsletter, The Essentials, as an example of how to be “provocative without being partisan … truth-tellers without being editorial writers.”

The essay was preceded by an unsigned note declaring that “It’s AP’s goal this year (and henceforth) to make this accountability journalism a consistent theme in our coverage of public affairs, politics and government. We have unmatched resources and expertise in every state to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make.”

“Katrina was a good example of when the journalism community got it right, because it was staring us in the face,” Fournier, seated in the AP’s Washington bureau, told Politico.

Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has teamed up with Google to offer the search giant’s online applications to its journalists.

Telegraph staff will now use Google’s applications to access email and share documents from anywhere in the world through any device with an internet connection.

At today’s close, the total decline in value of the dozen newspaper shares trading since the first of the year was nearly $27.7 billion, a plunge of 35.7% in 6½ months. This calculation does not include the shares of Scripps, which dropped some $6.2 billion in value on July 1 after the company’s non-newspaper assets were spun into a separate company.

With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTubes Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.