Public notices, those tiny-type blurbs announcing zoning issues, licensing applications and public meetings, seem anachronistic in our database-driven world. Does anyone use them? Can anyone use them, with that crammed-in text? They’re a long-term accepted oddity that persists today. When Geoff Cowan and David Westphal came out with their report last week on government’s historic subsidies of the press, the printing of public notices as newspaper advertising was one of the awkward stars. As Cowan and Westphal put it:

Historically, these fine-print notices have been a lucrative business for newspaper publishers, and have touched off heated bidding wars for government contracts…But the era of big money in public notices will almost certainly fade away. Proposals have been introduced in 40 states to allow local and state agencies to shift publication to the Web, in some cases to the government’s own Web sites.

And when those proposals are made, newspaper companies are quick to defend their lucrative turf — vociferously. Legislatures in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Ohio, among others, have considered moving public notices to government-run websites as a cost-cutting maneuver. These efforts are often for naught after strong newspaper opposition. (Virginia’s the latest, last week.)

Since the case against public notices seems so obvious — why should a local government buy ad space in a newspaper when it can publish the same material itself, in a more searchable and useful form? — I wanted to hear the arguments on the other side. Tonda Rush, a registered lobbyist for the newspaper industry and head of the Public Notice Resource Center, outlined for me the common arguments surrounding public notices. They fall into three domains. Keep reading »

Anne Galloway didn’t know anything about nonprofits or websites when she was laid off from Vermont’s Times Argus last January. She once believed the web was more distracting than resourceful. But a layoff has a funny way of upending your perspective, and now Galloway sits at the helm of her own nonprofit news site.

Galloway launched VT Digger in September 2009 with designs on filling a coverage gap in her home state of Vermont. Take a look through the offerings and you’ll see much of the content reads like the nitty-gritty stuff that used to grab column inches. That’s the point. During months of pre-launch interviews and research, Galloway concluded that the demand for enterprise reporting isn’t being met by the reduced staffs of Vermont’s newspapers.

VT Digger isn’t a hobby or a side project. Galloway is all in. She works full-time on the site, often starting at 4 a.m. and finishing up well after dinner. When I talked to her, she had just settled in at the Vermont statehouse. She’s commuting 45 minutes each way while the legislature is in session.

On the content side, Galloway tries to post 5-7 pieces a week. That’s a tough task for what’s basically a one-person operation. It’s made harder by the time-intensive nature of her content, which often requires interviews and background research. But in a savvy bit of efficiency, she’s boosting coverage by dialing back her editorial filter. That’s not to say she’s posting shaky articles. She’s just letting readers parse information for themselves. Keep reading »

CNET and Gizmodo have been sharing content for the last couple months. I confirmed that a partnership exists, but requests for additional information from either party were not fruitful.

Frankly, the most intriguing aspect of this partnership is already in plain view: The sites are posting the same articles. Take a look at this Gizmodo story then click over to the CNET version. Headlines change and there are subtle formatting differences, but the body copy is essentially the same.

Why is this relevant? If you’ve spent any time in the SEO world, you’ve probably heard of the semi-mythical duplication rule. As far as I can tell, CNET and Gizmodo are in duplication’s gray area.

The duplication penalty, or lack thereof

The cautionary tale of duplication generally goes like this: Google wants its search results to give precedence to the most popular/legitimate/relevant pages, and it’s tough to pull that off if the same articles appear on different domains. So Google uses filters to push copycats to the margins. Some people call this the “duplicate penalty,” but that’s a misnomer. Google isn’t slapping hands. Keep reading »

Google News launched a Spotlight section back in September to highlight “in-depth pieces of lasting value.” Initial response was positive, but with a few months under its belt I checked in to see if the feature is living up to that first flush of excitement.

The verdict?

It all depends on how you define “in-depth” and “lasting value.” The material on the page is certainly different from what you typically find on Google News. It’s a nice sample of deeper stories. But visiting the section doesn’t inspire the curiosity and intellectual satisfaction you’d get from a great magazine, newspaper or documentary film. “Lasting” isn’t a word that springs to mind. I’m guessing that has something to do with the algorithm.

Keep reading »

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

You may have already heard of The Journalism Shop, the assemblage of ex-Los Angeles Times staffers that has evolved into an editorial matchmaking service. (Its survey of ex-LATers detailing their predictions for the paper’s failure got some notice from Romenesko a couple weeks ago.)

It’s an online co-op where former Times reporters, editors, and designers can hang a freelance shingle and land jobs. The site, which evolved out of an email list for laid-off staffers, currently has around 30 members. And it’s throwing its hat into the ring for a Knight News Challenge grant. According to their application, they hope to build: Keep reading »

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

Laura Norton honed her crime-reporting skills in two years as a cops reporter at the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Now Norton, a freelancer in Washington, D.C., wants to build a new way to gather information on that city’s murders. (There have been 135 D.C. homicides so far in 2009.)

With Homicide Watch D.C., she wants to aggregate a variety of web-based resources — everything from official court documents to news reports to posts on Facebook and MySpace — and then create layers of context through original reporting. And here’s the hook: All that information will be constructed around the victims, not the crimes.

What she’s proposing is a mashup of crime visualizations, homicide blogs, social media tools, and the online gathering places offered by the likes of Legacy.com. The “victim pages” would be driven by an extensive database custom built for the project. Here’s a rough prototype from Norton’s proposal, built around De’Vante Glober, a 16-year-old shot and killed on Jan. 7: Keep reading »

We’ll have to wait another six months to find out who wins 2010 Knight News Challenge grants, but early data does reveal one key thing: the future of journalism has an abundance of ideas. Nearly 2,500 of them, all told.

The News Challenge received 2,489 proposals for the 2010 contest, according to Jose Zamora, journalism program associate at the Knight Foundation. That’s on par with last year, when there were 2,323.

The big change with the 2010 Challenge, and something we covered previously, was the availability of open and closed submission categories. In an email, Zamora said 65 percent of proposals came through the closed category and 35 percent were open. That’s a pretty big shift from September, when the ratio was roughly reversed — a sign that the late submitters wanted to keep their entries private. Keep reading »

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

Jackie Hai traces the idea for 101 Source back to two projects she worked on while at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Market Meltdown 101 and Economic Stimulus 101 were video-driven websites that featured economic experts explaining complicated ideas in plain language:

Keep reading »

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

Former Indianapolis Star software developer Chris Vannoy brings something unusual to his News Challenge application: a fully functional site already built on nights and weekends.

FollowIndy is a hyperlocal aggregator, tapping into the vast web of information published through Twitter, Flickr, news sites, and blogs. Its value is in the limits of its geography: The site only targets news and information relevant to Indianapolis. “Unlike a lot of aggregators that sort of cast a wide net, the idea is to get a very small net that’s aiming for a specific area,” Vannoy said. “It’s about getting a full picture of what’s going on in Indianapolis and then providing some context around what people are talking about.”

Once the sources are pulled into FollowIndy, content is automatically tagged and aggregated, which makes it possible to aggregate all material related to arson, apartment complexes, or Peyton Manning.

Aggregating both professional and personal feeds means Vannoy has data to track how stories are pushed by each — if mainstream media is pushing a story that’s then being picked up by personal users, or vice versa. That’s similar to the Media Cloud project of our friends down the street here at Harvard. For instance, here is a visualization of mentions of the word “flu” in the sources FollowIndy tracks. Notice how mentions spike after The Indianapolis Star mentions is around 24 seconds in: Keep reading »

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The Knight News Challenge closed submissions for the 2010 awards last night at midnight, which means that another batch of great ideas, interesting concepts, and harebrained schemes gave their chance to convince the Knight Foundation they deserve funding. (Trust us — great, interesting, and harebrained are all well represented at this stage each year.) We've been picking through the applications available for public inspection the past few weeks, and over the next few days Mac is going to highlight some of the ideas that struck us as worthy of a closer look — starting today with NewsGraf, below.

But we also want your help. Do you know of a really interesting News Challenge application? Did you submit one yourself? Let us know about it. Either leave a comment on this post or email Mac Slocum. In either case, keep your remarks brief — 200 words or less. We'll run some of the ones you think are noteworthy in a post later this week. —Josh]

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The most eye-catching thing about the NewsGraf’s proposal is its price tag; $950,000 over two years. That stands out in a sea of $50,000 and $100,000 requests.

But if you spend a little time digging into the intricacies of NewsGraf, that big price becomes downright reasonable. Cheap even. That’s because with NewsGraf, Mike Aldax and John Marshall want to digitally duplicate the knowledge, connections and synapses of a veteran journalist. That kind of audacity doesn’t come cheap.

Technologically speaking, NewsGraf ventures into the murky world of semantic tagging and social graphs. Unless you’ve got a computer science degree, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what NewsGraf is. It’s a database, it’s a search engine, but it’s also a connectivity machine. Keep reading »

Discussions involving Google and news organizations took a technical turn this week. Robots.txt files, search crawlers, click caps … I’m guessing most people aren’t intimately familiar with these things (and if you are, this piece isn’t for you). I figured it might be useful to strip away the tech jargon and filter a couple of Google’s latest efforts through a journalism-centric lens.

The First Click Free program now has a five-click cap

Google’s First Click Free model was introduced years ago as a way to level the playing field for subscription-based websites.

Here’s a little background: A publisher who opts in to First Click Free allows a visitor from Google to see the full text of an article that’s housed behind a registration wall (here’s an example; click the ” Oil prices” headline). That same user would encounter a login or subscription prompt if they tried to access the article through a different process, be it via the publisher’s site itself or through another search engine.

There’s upside to First Click Free for publishers and users alike. Publishers get the benefit of inbound Google traffic, a major source of page views and unique visitors. Users see all of the information in an article, not just a headline and snippet. (Dunder Mifflin employees take note.) Keep reading »

In 2006, Boston.com launched a local search tool that was supposed to be a big part of the site’s future. The project made perfect sense on paper: Readers would get search results focused on eastern Massachusetts. Those results would mix the best of the machine and human worlds by using algorithms and editors’ picks. Next to the results would be targeted advertising, opening up a lucrative revenue stream. And Boston.com would expand its audience with a useful new service.

Or so the thinking went.

The reality is that Boston.com’s local search never caught on. Traffic lifted a little after launch, but then it plateaued. “It’s been a flat line almost since we started in terms of use,” said Bob Kempf, vice president of product and technology at Boston.com. “It hasn’t really grown.”

Kempf and his team poked at the problem for a year, but an assortment of tweaks didn’t give local search the lift they needed. They eventually reached a diagnosis: Local search was fighting a losing battle against the audience’s expectation of what Boston.com could be.

“We’ve done so well over the last 14 years as a news and information site,” Kempf said. “That’s what people are accustomed to getting from us.” Keep reading »