Two more interesting things they’ve done:

-Allowed people to turn their voice-mail comments about stories in the LFP and turn them into podcasts with LFP staff commentary.

-Begun to do video news coverage of things too small for our local stations to bother with (yet big enough to be interesting)

A presentation by Steve Groves (director of Internet media) on it can be found here: http://prezi.com/54980/

http://www.lfpress.com/

I’m going to send this post back in Steve’s direction. The LFP might use some of Google’s ideas…

[...] ones still in charge, making decisions and running their businesses into the ground so that their companies are not only unable to fulfill the needs of the consumer, but so that they can’t afford to hire the talent that could save their ass either. It just [...]

[...] Google Labs released their News Timeline feature, it prompted Mathew Ingram at Harvard University Nieman Journalism Lab to call for more creativity from news organisations. Mathew [...]

[...] editor for the Toronto Globe & Mail, wrote on Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab blog “Papers: more creativity please” in response to Google’s News Timeline effort. One question kept nagging at me as I [...]

[...] and couldn’t raise the money for the most lucrative acquisition imaginable.  Which (aside to Matt Ingram) is why there’s not much creativity coming from them. (Amazingly, most newspaper firms are [...]

[...] Journalism Lab has a great post this a.m. in reaction to a new Google Lab release: a Google News timeline view,: which gives users the [...]

[...] Papers: more creativity please » Nieman Journalism Lab Kevin: Mathew Ingram calls on newspapers to think more creatively as Google News launches a feature that allows you to navigate news by time. He asks: "One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this?" This has been done, back in 2007 by El Comercio in Peru. But I still take his point. There is a lot of room in innovation in all parts of the newspaper business, both on the editorial side and the commercial side. (tags: newspapers innovation Google development) [...]

[...] left, and couldn’t raise the money for the most lucrative acquisition imaginable. Which (aside to Matt Ingram) is why there’s not much creativity coming from them. (Amazingly, most newspaper firms are [...]

[...] “Why couldn’t a news organization have done this?” [...]

[...] editor for the Toronto Globe & Mail, wrote on Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab blog “Papers: more creativity please” in response to Google’s News Timeline effort. One question kept nagging at me as I [...]

I didn’t mean to suggest that the Washington Post hasn’t done anything creative in terms of displaying content by any means — I was thinking specifically of the tag-cloud view of headlines and some of the other interface projects that I remember being part of the original Remix effort. I probably could have phrased that part a little better.

And thanks for including that link to some of the projects that Peter has been involved in. It is a great list.

http://push.cx/2009/washington-post-update

Among the recent efforts there, I really enjoy the political appointments database:

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2009/federal-appointments/

[...] Eat Sleep Publish April 21, 2009 Mathew Ingram on Google News Timeline [...]

For Google, this news timeline thing is right in its comfort zone/focus: Index, organize, and deliver existing content; whereas for newspapers, their comfort zone/focus has always been content creation, with a little bit of delivery thrown in. Those focuses are in the blood and culture of these respective companies. Take either one out of its comfort zone and put it in a different arena, and it’ll likely struggle. “Geek talents” at newspapers probably feel a little (or perhaps a lot) like visual designers at Google:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

So if you pit a content-creation company that’s trying to do tech stuff as well against a tech company on what is essentially a tech problem, my money would be on the tech company every time.

While newspapers definitely need to be much more tech-minded than in the past, not being in a world of infinite resources, I don’t know if their future lies in them becoming capable of going toe-to-toe with the likes of Google on technological innovation. Perhaps it’s about taking being more adept at taking the innovations that come out of the tech sector and using them to allow you to better excel at what you are good at, like how blogging software allowed millions of content creators to disseminate their content. Those content creators didn’t arrive at that point by becoming developers and programmers. They did it by employing the tools created by developers and programmers.

[...] editor for the Toronto Globe & Mail, wrote on Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab blog “Papers: more creativity please” in response to Google’s News Timeline effort. One question kept nagging at me as I [...]