The economics of online news

Overview

Editor?s note: These are excerpts from material contributed by the Pew Internet Project to the Pew Research Center?s Project for Excellence in Journalism ?State of the News Media 2010? report. Read the full report at journalism.org »

Behind the scenes of a typical ISP: (!)

Analysis of Google finds only 11% of news content original

Jonathan Stray from the Nieman Journalism Lab recently conducted an analysis of the amount of original news content found in news articles through Google. In conducting the analysis, Stray took a major headlining article in the news and then tracked how many articles pertaining to the subject contained original content. The results of the analysis were surprising. Stray examined 121 different articles covering the announcement that students in a Chinese university had hacked into American computers, finding that only 13 or 11% had some original content.

US spooks plotted to destroy Wikileaks

In this two-year-old classified Army Counterintelligence Center report (hosted on wikileaks.org, where else?), American spooks set out to destroy Wikileaks by intimidating its sources. They cite as justification for this the fact that Wikileaks has outed American embarrassments and crimes including “US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.”

Blogging Lessons From TechCrunch and Mashable

This is a guest post by Adesoji Adegbulu. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I started blogging by reading a lot of blogs. Among all the blogs I still read are Mashable and TechCrunch. I never skip them on my RSS reader, and I feel that other people do the same.

The question then becomes: how did TechCrunch and Mashable managed to become the more popular blogs in a saturated niche like the tech one? The followed some basic but powerful steps, and I will talk about them below.

Web Faceoff: Chatroulette vs. Hot or Not

Chatroulette is all the rage for many, while another good chunk of you say you won?t touch the thing with a 10-foot web browser for fear of seeing things that make you want to wash your eyes out with soap. It?s certainly the hot internet phenomenon of the moment though, and we wanted to pair it up with an older meme that shares Chatroulette?s philosophy of randomness: Hot or Not.

Americans are becoming news ?grazers?

The American news consumer is increasingly becoming a grazer, across both online and offline platforms, according to new research from PEJ and the Pew Internet and American Life Project. ?On a typical day, nearly half of Americans now get news from four to six different platforms?from online to TV to print and more.

China: Various aspects of censorship

March 12 was the World Day Against Cyber Censorship and Reporter without Border announced its latest list of ?Enemies of the Internet? which points finger at China, among other authoritarian states.

Jason Ng from Kenengba tries to enrich the discussion by outline various aspects of Chinese Internet censorship.

Facebook Overtakes Google Search

Hitwise, a web analysis business, said on its Analyst Weblog that Facebook was the most visited site last week, overtaking Google Search for the first time.

30 Valuable Lessons Learned Using Social Media for Small Business

from ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse

PR Pros Use Twitter to Reinvigorate Brands, Engage in Conversation

Fairmont Hotels & Resorts operates luxury properties in countries all over the world, from the U.S. and Canada to Asia the Middle East and Africa. Aside from traditional promotions, one of the ways it connects with current, past and future guests is via its main Twitter account. Several accounts are also maintained by individual properties.

Why understanding data must take its place in new media literacies

from edu.blogs.com by Ewan McIntosh

Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide

At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for “raw data now” — for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up.…

Google Italy & Privacy: Not What You Might Think

Reading through Italian news coverage of the Google Italy case, another picture emerges. User privacy may well be at issue, but not in the way you probably think. I grew up in Italy and now research and teach Internet law in the United States. When I heard about the verdict against three Google executives, one of them an alumnus of the law school where I work, I went first to American sources, then to Italian ones. What I found was that most Americans may be getting the basic facts and ideas of the case wrong.