by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
As news of the Fort Hood shooting rampage spread last week, media outlets and readers both put Twitter and its new lists feature to the test.
Just as the service was instrumental in providing updates during the summer’s election protests in Iran, Twitter feeds from Texas-based news sources such as the Austin-American Statesman and the Killeen Daily Herald provided a stream of local updates.
It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.
by Jonnelle Marte, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
A new Oklahoma law that will allow the state to publish detailed information about abortion patients online has created uproar from critics who view it as a blow to women’s rights and is providing the latest fodder in the debate over online-data privacy.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Huffington Post has launched a new monthly feature it’s calling the “Real Misery Index,” which it says offers a more accurate snapshot of the economic struggles Americans face today than the original one.
Developed in the 1970s by Arthur Okun, a Yale and Brookings Institution economist, the Misery Index is calculated by adding the unemployment rate and inflation rate.
“Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers.
by Marisa Taylor, Tech Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
If journalism were a psychological disorder, traditional print reporters have attention deficit disorder, while bloggers are more on the obsessive-compulsive-disorder side of the coin.
As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement.
by Luca Sofri, Italian Journalist, Blogger, Huffington Post
One week ago I met Kara Swisher in Rome. She asked me about Twitter in Italy and I told her we were about Twitter in 2007 but now we’ve moved on….Mainstream Web users are all on Facebook (Facebook has been huge here since last summer) while Web-savvy people interested in microblogging now prefer FriendFeed with its richer features.
The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today: It’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are–”Welcome.”
by Dave Johnson, Founder and Principal Author, Seeing the Forest
The Motion Picture Association of America is suing to stop RealPlayer’s RealDVD from being sold to computer owners. RealDVD lets you make backup copies of your movie DVDs onto your computer. It doesn’t let you make new DVDs or share the files from your computer with others–it just lets you keep for yourself a backup.
by Simon Dumenco, Columnist, Ad Age, The Media Guy
What if the privately held Huffington Post is worth not $200 million–a cracked-out number floated last year–or even $100 million, but, say, $2 mil? This is not entirely an academic question, given that in December HuffPo astonished media watchers by securing $25 million in additional funding from Oak Investment Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm.
by Beth Callaghan, Director, Web Operations, AllThingsD.com
Thanks to the Web, 2008 marks a high point in the level of engagement between American voters and their presidential candidates. As Arianna Huffington declared yesterday, “I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race. The Internet.” On Election Day itself, that statement is more apt than ever. Sites like fivethirtyeight.com and politicalwire.com will provide virtually up-to-the-minute numbers on every race. It’s a level of immediacy that was hard to imagine before now–but it’s also hard to imagine we ever had it any other way.
I moved to New York City a mere six months ago, expecting an anonymous existence while I struggled to make new friends. Things moved quickly, starting with my very first night out.
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