As news organizations roll out their coverage plans for Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings next week, some interesting innovation is coming from a player some critics have labeled stodgy: the Associated Press.

AP is promising readers insider access to the toughest ticket in Washington with the Twitter feed AP_Courtside. Some tweets will respond to reader questions and suggestions, while others will link to AP blog coverage on Yahoo News or to the news agency’s traditional content.

Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is AP’s promise that readers will “direct our coverage.” Though the Yahoo blog won’t be up until hearings begin next Monday, the Twitter feed is already soliciting reader feedback:

AP_Courtside: Beginning July 13, AP will go behind the scenes of the #Sotomayor Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Will you be our assignment editor?

AP_Courtside: Welcome to all our new followers. AP will take you inside the #Sotomayor confirmation hearings next week. What would you like us to cover?

AP_Courtside: We know you’re talking about next week’s #Sotomayor hearings. Why not talk with @AP_Courtside? What would you like us to report on?

The post announcing the blog on Yahoo makes an even harder sell by asking readers: “Want to pose your own questions to reporters and their sources?”

Is this a serious crowdsourcing enterprise from the news giant or simply an attempt to engage Twitter users with AP’s existing content? I asked AP’s Jim Kennedy, vice president and director of strategic planning, to explain this new initiative. Keep reading »

[We're doing another Lab Book Club this week and next, on Bill Wasik's And Then There's This. Today, Ian Crouch summarizes and reviews the book's arguments; we'll have more excerpts from our interview with Wasik in the coming days. —Josh]

Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture deceptively slim book is packed with anecdotes, theories, and arguments about contemporary media culture. It’s part memoir from Wasik, the merry prankster who created the flash mob craze in 2003. And it’s part cultural inquiry, complete with clever social experiments and searing commentary. 

While Wasik admits he is often tempted “to lionize viral culture as a people-powered paradise,” he thoroughly and persuasively argues that most of what we see, read, and discuss with one another is disposable by design, and ultimately corrosive. Let’s consider some of Wasik’s larger arguments.

The nanostory

Does the name Blair Hornstine ring a bell? Probably not, though that’s fine with Wasik. He suspects that if you remember anything about her, it will be her brief notoriety as the “girl who sued to become valedictorian” of her graduating class in 2003. She had been forced to share the top spot with a classmate due to a technicality, and rather than graciously share the honor, she decided instead to take her case to federal court, where the judge awarded her sole rights to the position and a hefty chunk of cash in punitive damages. Hornstine’s tale might have ended there, had the local paper she often wrote for not discovered that many of her stories contained extensive cases of plagiarism. Harvard rescinded her acceptance and talking heads rushed to label her emblematic of all that was wrong with America’s success-obsessed youth.  Keep reading »

Running a marathon this fall? The New York Times wants to be your coach.

The Times recently debuted what may be a first for a traditional newspaper: an interactive marathon training application called Run Well. It lets you choose an upcoming marathon to run and offers six training programs — from famous coaches including Greg McMillan and Jeff Galloway — tailored to a reader’s running experience. Once you chose a program, the tracker displays a full training calendar, a progress chart, and detailed information about each day’s run. You can log each day’s workout, adding any specific comments you’ll want to remember later.

The Times has featured a lot of marathon coverage under the Run Well brand in past month, starting with Well blogger/columnist Tara Parker-Pope’s first post in May announcing her own plans to run the New York Marathon on November 1. There have been running-tech reviews from the Gadgetwise blog, fitness-advice pieces from the Personal Best blog, and a photo profile feature called Running Voices. But, while a web app to track runs may seem like a departure from the Times’ traditional content, Pope sees it as a natural offshoot of the Well blog, which has been one of the Times’ biggest blogging successes.

“If this didn’t fit with the Well blog, then we wouldn’t have done it this way,” she told me. “We realized that the project was very consistent with the mission of Well, which is to empower readers to take charge of their own health.”

The app was built by in-house by Alan McLean and Ben Koski of the Interactive Newsroom Technologies group, with assistance from the Times’ graphics department. It is not the first run-tracker on the web (see Nike’s Training Log, the Runner’s World guide, and others) but it appears to be a first for a news site.

Keep reading »