Strong Photo Story on Pregnancy in Tanzania

Story in the NYTimes about the death rates of mothers and babies in the dire conditions.

Technology and trials

There are starting to be more and more trials that are being tossed out as a result of jurors using technology to research from their iPhone or Blackberry resulting in mistrials. Because people have become so accustomed to using technology for so much of their daily lives, I bet many don't even realize they are breaking rules stipulated to the jury. How often do you automatically do some form of a search about something to have a better understanding?

Imagine if you are a juror on a trial and the prosecution or defense uses a term or talks about something you have to understanding of and you want to know more to be able to make a better decision as a juror. Or even when you are overly connected, much like myself, and you decide to send a Tweet out about something you are doing. It just so happens that you are in jury deliberations when you do send out a message as an instinctual process. You broke the rules of being on a jury.

I'm sure we'll see more instances of this as we go forward. What if it ends up altering the way in which trials are carried out? Might be something interesting to watch as we go forward with technology that becomes more omnipresent in our lives.

50 Things we learned in the last year

There's a bunch of great stories and links in this compilation by TampaBayOnline. There's a few things I had forgotten and a few new ones listed.

What a wild and crazy year. I still feel that exponential theory as applied to the technology of our daily lives is speeding up our society at breakneck speeds. Every year it seems as though everyone makes the statement –"So many more things happened in the last year than the year before."

Well, here's hoping 2009 doesn't break us all, in so many different ways.

Watershed moment in the future of American politics?

"We know it's in the millions," he said of the number of e-mails that lawmakers in the House have been receiving. "But we haven't counted yet, because when you're about to get hit by a tidal wave, you don't count the drops of water in the wave."

Seems as though millions of Americans let their voices be heard not only by calling their representatives. They used the fastest communication tool available. E-mail. And the US House wasn't ready for the traffic.

This is the first presidential election cycle that is saturated with the use of online tools and portals. The ease and effectiveness of the Internet in communication will become more and more integrated into our world. Hence, the iPhone and Android phones are the early stages of the evolution towards the mobility and connectivity of our communication world.

Traffic is Growing Fast—but Capacity is Keeping Pace

Some interesting tidbits about the growth of Internet traffic and trends. 

What's after convergence? Mobile Media

1 million iPhones sold over the weekend. I'm planning on picking one up myself in September. Too bad Apple went with AT&T, but I can't wait until 2011 for the market to open up. The media landscape will be vastly different by that time.

Why even have titles anymore?

John Temple, editor, publisher and president of the Rocky Mountain News, writes about the new process of producing news in this time of "somewhere in between the old and new days."

As I read about all the types of coverage and types of mediums used I only recognized two names from the photo staff producing visual content from the field out of the seven or more identified in the blog post. All the others were from other parts of the newsroom. Starting to look like a convergent newsroom in Denver, where you need to know how to do everything when it comes to reporting the news.

'Til Debt Do Us Part

Not to be a doom and gloomer with the recent posts, but......

Editor & Publisher story about how newspaper debt is strangling the industry and the cost cutting might not help in the long run.

Another collision of sorts

So there's been an interesting story going on in Boulder. Seems a rent-a-guard and a restaurant co-owner had a Taser shootout over a parking issue this past weekend. It's been getting all kinds of traffic because of the weirdness and stupidity that abounds. As a result an editorial cartoon was created in response. There it is, another blending of mediums. Don't know if it's as funny as peeing with a focus, but it's pretty dang funny.

Pay attention at ALL TIMES

Looks like Ryan McGeeney of the Standard-Examiner took a javelin in the leg. It's not too nasty, but I'm sure it hurt like hell. Looks like he'll be alright. But the quote from the coach and the results after the incident make this a classic for the beer table after shooting some state athletic event.

Umm, looks like newspapers still face an uphill battle

Either newspapers are not giving their readers what they want to read and see or maybe people are just learning to be more effective in using the web. If I use a newspaper's RSS feed on each topic of my choosing, I don't have to spend as much time on the site. Let's take that one step further – if I use GoogleReader for that feed and the tease doesn't interest me I won't click on the story anyway.

Being a purist about journalism and what is important to the community is critical to creating quality journalism, but if the community doesn't care until something spirals out of control how do you maintain an effective audience? As media outlets drive 120mph with their hair on fire to the online realm -with an occasional brake check for no reason whatsoever- the online outlet really needs to have tons of forethought. Still a long way to go in the transition from a dinosaur to Optimus Prime.

'We're Eliminating the position of...'

Perfect thought:

"I must concede, too, I had reached a point where I routinely was embarrassed by the product I worked for, and if you find yourself feeling that way, maybe it’s time to go. I had been there when The Sun was a good little paper, and it was hard for me to watch it slide into nothingness."

What's Popurls?

Just about anything that is getting lots of traffic on the web. Flickr, YouTube, digg, readdit....Shastakovitch ! Too many to list. Just click over there.

Also the source for this Journalism url compilation.

Something better than JL's Blog of Blogs

A site that has all the journalism info you could ever want. Holy crapola

Found this via Will Sullivan's Journerdism blog.

Hulu to go LIVE

Looks like the convergence will get a can of Monster tomorrow. NBC Universal and Fox venture Hulu, which has full-length television programing and movies streaming online, goes live on March 12.

"Hello, Comcast. I'd like to cancel my cable television."

TV will learn what newspapers are living

And they will learn it much faster than we all thought. TV execs can send the love letters to Steve Jobs and his AppleTV. Seems that people are migrating to the web to watch their beloved television shows in droves. The catch? TV folks don't want too many peeps going to the web, there's more ad revenue on the tele than on the web. Exactly what newspapers are going through.

"Our challenge with all these ventures is to effectively monetize them so that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies,” Mr. Zucker said, calling it the No. 1 challenge for the industry.

Tracking searches & views

The NYTimes and COMscore let the cat out of the bag on the future of internet advertising. It's all about what you are interested in and what you search for. All the major players – Yahoo, News Corp. (think MySpace), AOL, etc. – have some serious data to mine and throw unique ads on your pages. They then get to charge advertisers accordingly.

Wikipedia – The difficulty of being ad free

Read this on the LATimes. Makes me wonder how many will be able to survive sustainability on the internet without advertising. If advertising is the only way to pay for things and most of those advertisers can generate their own advertising online for the most part, it could be difficult to find a balance.

MultimediaShooter Dies

Gotta love stupid lazy, bored, zit-faced brats. Looks like hackers have taken down a decent site of free-flowing info and a sense of community in this jacked up world of media. Thanks jerks.

POYi Winners too

MediaStorm compiled a list of some of the winners to make it a bit easier for us. More stuff to review and learn from.....