Online News News & Articles

This week in web publishing, online publishers get tools for leveraging social media, while the Pulitzer Prize awards online news organizations.

Tom Foremski of the Silicon Valley Watcher has continually called for the need of the media engineer -- an individual who is part journalist and part software engineer -- in today’s web publishing industry. Lately, his vision is becoming reality.

The Guardian News & Media (via Guardian.co.uk) are broadcasting their recent good fortune. It turns out that it has sold 68,979 copies of its premium iPhone app, which launched in December. Does the future of web publishing belong to iPhone apps?

This week in web publishing the focus has been on newspapers, layoffs and paid content. But let's start with the good news.

It's Friday. You're taking a break from whatever it is that you should be doing. You maintain that your browse through the aisles of CMSWire are work-related and not frivolous internet surfing.

As web designers, information architects, usability experts, we spend lots of time surfing the Internet looking for ideas. Be them online shopping or social networking sites, we chock it up as market research and bosses be damned, we're working!

Who would have guessed that we were right?

In rough economic times such as these, it is important to recognize the more optimistic efforts being made to inspire change by way of new media and technology.

Thanks to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization dedicated to awarding grants to help transform journalism and communities, twenty-one innovative ideas that will help residents lead informed lives have received US$ 5 million. The projects are the first winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, a five-year, US$ 24 million initiative to help community foundations support creative ways to use new media and technology to keep communities engaged.

Chances are if you didn't know anything about Web publishing a few months ago, you do now. News about the industry is hard to escape, and its growing popularity will continue as long as the economy spirals downward. The last few weeks have proved productive for those interested in expanding and promoting their presence on the Web.

Can a newspaper exist without publishing syndicated news content?

Early this month, The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey, put this question to the test with a one-day boycott of The Associated Press news. The print issue relied primarily on stories by staff members, as well as Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, McClatchy-Tribune News Service and several smaller Advance Publication papers in New Jersey.

After the one-day experiment, The Star-Ledger was back to publishing AP news. While the boycott may have been inspired by a need to prove independence from the world’s largest news-gathering source, it also may have been fueled by the rate increase the AP is implementing in January 2009.