The desktop web has been a revolutionary platform in terms of access to information, the democratization of publishing, and the socialization of media. But as a medium for consuming news content, from a user interface and user experience perspective, it’s problematic at best and downright awful at worst. News consumption has begun a major shift from the traditional desktop web to apps for touch tablets for a simple reason — the user experience and user interface are so much better, as the recent RJI survey of iPad users reflects. Consumers are choosing tablet apps over the traditional desktop web based on the quality of the user experience and the overall content “package.”

News organizations are already shifting their strategies to take advantage of that consumer shift. But few have thought about the role of syndication in news apps. With the immersive, hands-on experience of a tablet news app, the value of syndication changes entirely. Apps that deliver nothing but one news organization’s content will not compare favorably with the content richness of the web, no matter how good the UI is. And apps that bounce users around from site to site with an in-app browser, mimicking the traditional desktop web model, will fail for precisely the reason why users chose the app in the first place.

But news apps that can deliver full content, curated from a wide range of sources, within a cohesive, optimized — even breakthrough — UI for news consumption, will win because users will have the best of both worlds. Syndication in news apps will not be about republishing news that everyone else has. It will be about combining curated news with original content in order to create consumer packages that are deeply engaging and in many cases worth paying for. With this shift, news organizations will stop ceding to aggregators the huge value creation of curating and packaging news. Instead, news organizations will start defining their editorial brands as curators as much as they define them as original content creators.

Read the rest at Nieman Journalism Lab.

ProPublica, GlobalPost, Texas Tribune, and Texas Watchdog have created their newswires in Publish2′s platform for sharing and distributing journalism in print and across the Web.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer-winning nonprofit news organization specializing in investigative journalism on topics including the Gulf oil spill, mortgage modifications, and post-Katrina New Orleans.

ProPublica stories are available for free, for print or online publication, via Publish2 News Exchange.

Here’s what Scott Klein, ProPublica Editor of News Applications, finds exciting about News Exchange:

“We’re excited by Publish2′s idea of making the process of syndicating news stories frictionless and intuitive, and think it dovetails well with our strategy of partnering with news organizations who reach influential audiences to have real-world impact. We’re looking forward to working with them to get our stories in front of editors all over the world.”

Subscribe to the ProPublica newswire today and automatically export their stories to your newsroom’s publishing system for easy access to a free and steady stream of award-winning journalism.

GlobalPost is an international news service that employs a core team of more than 50 correspondents around the world and works with more than 125 freelance journalists to produce top-shelf news and features, more important than ever to newspapers as many have cut their own reporting from overseas.

Dave Underhill, Director of Syndication at GlobalPost, had this to say about Publish2:

“Publish2 News Exchange provides a variety of platform options for our customers. We deliver our syndication service via RSS, but some legacy newspapers have front-end systems that aren’t designed to take in RSS feeds easily. Publish2 will allow them to integrate our story feeds with their own content and other services, which in turn makes it easier for the editors to select and use our material. Simultaneously, their online operations can ingest our RSS and create custom pages for their readers. We look forward to the growth of this service and to providing GlobalPost to new clients in partnership with Publish2.”

The GlobalPost newswire is available now in News Exchange for their existing syndication customers. Find out more about becoming a GlobalPost syndication customer here.

The Texas Tribune covers every major issue in the state of Texas as a nonprofit news organization, with a mission to “promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern.”

Ross Ramsey, managing editor at The Texas Tribune, offered his take:

“Part of The Texas Tribune’s mission is to make news and information about Texas politics and government available to everybody, including to other publications interested in our content. This ought to make that easier.”

Subscribe to the Texas Tribune newswire now in Publish2 News Exchange to publish their stories in full — in print and online — for free, in exchange for proper attribution and links.

Texas Watchdog is another Lone Star state nonprofit digging into politics and local issues with original investigative reporting and curation of the best journalism in the region.

Subscribe to the Texas Watchdog newswire in News Exchange to route their reporting to your print edition or website — and to your readers — at no cost to your news organization.

Ready to get started? Log in now at Publish2.com and search for newswires that suit your news organization’s needs.

Want to syndicate your own content, or share it with partner newspapers in your state and across the country? Create your first newswire and give your subscribers and partners permission to subscribe to it today.

New to Publish2? Register now. Publish2 News Exchange is the easiest way to share and distribute content for print and Web publishing.

Any questions? Drop us a line! We’re here to help you get started.

On Sunday, the Daily Telegram in Adrian, Michigan became the first newspaper to run a story — two stories, in fact — they found using News Exchange.

On a business page featuring a syndicated columnist and wire stories, the editors ran a pair of stories from DailyFinance.com.

Using a free newswire from this online-only financial news site, the Daily Telegram brought their readers relevant, quality stories that mattered to Michigan.

Here’s what Special Projects Editor Erik Gable said about the decision on Twitter:

“We will be augmenting our Sunday print edition with the @Publish2 News Exchange for the first time this weekend.”

What could your newspaper do with Publish2 News Exchange?

See for yourself. Register now at Publish2.com or log in with your existing account today to find great stories for your print edition.

Questions about how to get started? Find us at contact@publish2.com anytime.

]]> http://blog.publish2.com/2010/06/07/publish2-news-exchange-stories-in-print-dailyfinance-in-the-daily-telegram/feed/ 1 http://blog.publish2.com/2010/06/04/spotlight-on-stories-three-national-news-sources-available-in-publish2-news-exchange-today/ http://blog.publish2.com/2010/06/04/spotlight-on-stories-three-national-news-sources-available-in-publish2-news-exchange-today/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:36:26 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://blog.publish2.com/?p=1230 We’re turning the spotlight on three news sources in Publish2 News Exchange. These are online-only news organizations distributing their stories for newspapers to run in print — free in exchange for attribution.

First, Politics Daily:

Here’s what Melinda Henneberger, Editor-in-Chief, says about Politics Daily’s reporting style:

“What PoliticsDaily.com offers is effectively counter-programming; instead of attempting to dominate the 10-second news cycle, our goal is to offer a thoughtful take on events. We value writing at a moment when the conventional wisdom says that nothing could matter less.”

And here are a few examples of Politics Daily stories in News Exchange today that any newspaper could run in print tomorrow:

Obama, Jan Brewer Talk Immigration, Promise Cooperation
White House correspondent Alex Wagner covers President Obama’s meeting with the Governor of Arizona.

Louisiana Congressman Launches Petition to Fire BP CEO Tony Hayward
Patricia Murphy’s story covers Charlie Melancon’s online petition and the response to it so far.

Brian Sandoval, Sharron Angle Lead for GOP Governor, Senate Nods in Nevada
Bruce Drake covers the latest polls in Nevada’s election races.

Subscribe to the Politics Daily newswire and connect your News Exchange subscriptions to your print publishing system via authenticated feeds or FTP to easily bridge the gap between the Web and your print edition.

Next, in-depth coverage of health policy from the independent nonprofit Kaiser Health News newswire:

Laurie McGinley, Executive Editor for News at KHN, spent 27 years at the Wall Street Journal, and was part of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for AIDS coverage.

Here a national story your newspaper could run in print, for free, tomorrow morning:

Obama’s Health IT Leader Says Doctors Will Embrace Change
Irene M. Wielawski (another Pulitzer Prize winner, from the Los Angeles Times staff that covered the 1992 riots and 1994 Northridge earthquake) talks about Electronic Medical Records with the Obama administration’s National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Subscribe to the Kaiser Health News newswire now, and run this story in your print edition for free tomorrow.

Finally, The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news organization based at Columbia University focusing on in-depth education coverage:

Richard Lee Colvin, Editor at The Hechinger Report, has reported on education for the Los Angeles Times, Oakland Tribune, Hayward Daily Review, and the Associated Press.

Here’s a Q&A on a controversial issue with a member of the State Board of Education in Texas:

Q&A: Texas board member says ‘the Founding Fathers would be proud’ of controversial changes
The Report interviews David Bradley, a Republican member of the board from Beaumont, Texas, about the board’s decision to approve a social studies curriculum that encourages high school students to question the concept of the separation of church and state.

Subscribe to The Hechinger Report newswire today, and run this story in print this weekend as a sidebar to your local coverage of education, politics, or religion.

Ready to get started? Log in now at Publish2.com and search for newswires that suit your news organization’s needs.

Want to syndicate your own content, or share it with partner newspapers in your state and across the country? Create your first newswire and give your subscribers and partners permission to subscribe to it today.

New to Publish2? Register now. Publish2 News Exchange is the easiest way to share and distribute content for print and Web publishing.

There’s no such thing as a local website.

Think about it for a minute.

There are websites that publish CONTENT pertaining to a particular locality — but a local WEBsite is an oxymoron, because all websites exist on the WORLD WIDE web, i.e. any website can be accessed (barring censorship) anywhere in the world.

A local newspaper, in contrast, is only distributed in a limited geographic region. Before the web, if a local newspaper reported a story of national significance, there were two ways for that story to get national distribution:

1. A wire service distributed and/or rewrote the story
2. A national news brand re-reported (and/or rewrote) the story

That was the solution to the problem of physical distribution — but now, local news content published on the web by a local news brand can be accessed anywhere in the world.

And yet it isn’t — because now the distribution problem isn’t a physical limitation, but instead a problem with ATTENTION. There is no way for that story to get attention on the web outside of the audience who already visits the local news brand’s website because they know the brand locally.

But what if there were a way for a local story on a local news brand’s website to get national attention?

And what if there were a way to do it without the help of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, New York Times, or any other national brand?

Well, there is way…

A local news brand’s content could get national attention on the web if every other local news brand linked to it on their websites.

Huh?

Let me take a step back to explain. I’ve been writing a lot about link journalism, a way that journalists can enhance their original reporting and even create a new type of original editorial content by linking to other content on the web.

Because journalists don’t link to anything, they are completely disenfranchised from the web’s link driven distribution system.

But what if journalists did start to link… to each other.

Bloggers have been doing this for years, which is why some top bloggers have better distribution on the web than many journalists.

Ryan Sholin has a list of top blogs that journalists should emulate in their effort to become web-native reporters — most of Ryan’s suggestions are masters of link blogging.

Now imagine if 1,000 newspapers where actively link blogging about issues of local importance — and linking to each other’s reporting on the same issues as part of their link journalism effort.

For example, take the killings at Northern Illinois University, a tragedy of national interest. This event happened in Rockford Register Star’s backyard, and they reported the story from a unique local perspective.

Now imagine if local news brands around the country, as part of their coverage, linked to Rockford’s reporting — and to reporting by the Daily Chronicle in Dekalb, and reporting from other Illinois papers.

If enough newspaper sites around the country did this, the original reporting by these local news brands could have effectively gotten national distribution.

Here’s a less dramatic example. Let’s say you’re a local journalist assigned to report on concerns about local water quality. A simple search on Google news reveals local stories on water quality from across the country, fodder for a great link journalism piece to complement original reporting on how the issue presents in your locality.

But the result would be that your link journalism drives traffic to other local sites — put another way, your journalism would contributing to the national distribution of the reporting by those other local journalists, on the issue of water quality.

It’s national distribution, using a distributed model, i.e. distributing content across hundreds of localities adds up to national distribution. (Yeah, it takes a while to wrap your brain around that.)

But not only is it national distribution, it’s content targeted distribution — you’re directing people interested in a topic to other content on that topic.

This is just scratching the surface, but here’s the key — local newspapers need to reinvent their business model. And the current business model is failing because it’s based on a shrinking distribution model.

So how do you reinvent the business model?

First you need to reinvent the distribution model.

(Shameless plug: Imagine if there were an easy way for journalists to share with each other links to their best reporting, and to vote up the best local reporting on issues of common interest, kind of a Digg for journalists, editors, and newsrooms, where they could combine the power of their links and create a new distribution network — then local news brands could really drive large quantities of traffic to each other’s reporting.)

But first lets look at how the concept of link journalism has been refined and supported:

From Josh Cantone at ReadWriteWeb:

The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they’re being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.

Mindy McAdams points to the example of Joshua Micah Marshall’s link journalism on Talking Points Memo, which recently receive a George Polk Award in journalism:

In providing links to diverse reports appearing in many different locations, TPM’s Marshall and his colleagues demonstrated the authority of their analysis that particular U.S. attorneys had been dismissed for political reasons.

Rather than relying on what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have famously criticized as the “journalism of assertion,” the new link journalism supplies evidence by backing up statements. Rather than making a phone call to a favorite and easy-to-reach expert or pundit, the journalist conducts research (imagine that!) and sources the facts by linking directly to them.

Jack Lail shares his own experience with link journalism:

I’ve been posting content that consisted of links to blogs for about a year and have for a long time included outbound links in stories. But those efforts are accelerating. I recently began experimenting with Karp on creating sets of links as content, some created by one person bookmaking relevant content and some as collaborative efforts of multiple bookmarkers.

The results are impressive. These outbound linking articles are strong traffic drivers because, I believe, they are providing a valuable, time-saving service to readers. On more than one day in the past week, a link “article” was the No. 1 “story” on the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites. And in the context of stories, they provide an additional rich layering of information.

All of these observations support the substantive journalistic value — and content value — of links in the context of a specific reporting effort, i.e. the link journalism equivalent of a news article.

But what’s the link journalism equivalent of the entire newspaper?

That’s were networked link journalism comes into play.

Networked link journalism is combining all the links created by journalists practicing link journalism to determine that most important, interesting, and newsworthy content that journalists are linking to.

In the simplest form of networked link journalism, one link = one vote. The stories with the most votes rise to the top.

This is the newspaper of the future — or rather the newspaper of today. This is how Google works, and how Digg works, by combining the power of many links.

What’s on a Google search results page? Or Digg’s homepage? A bunch of links.

But not just any links — the “best” links.

Why do some many people go to Google and Digg to click on those links? Why do they drive so much traffic on the web?

Because those links are determined by networks, not individuals — and networks are the most powerful force on the web.

An individual practicing link journalism can drive tens or, in the case of top link blogger/journalists, hundreds of visits for each link. The uber link journalists like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan can drive a few thousand. Matt Drudge, the exception that proves the rule, can drive many thousands.

It’s all a matter of scale.

Journalists practicing link journalism in isolation can influence content distribution on the web (which most journalists are not doing at all), but only to a limited degree.

Journalists practicing networked link journalism, on the other hand, could have a huge influence over content distribution on the web — if enough journalists participated, they could drive enough traffic to crash servers.

We created Publish2 as a platform for networked link journalism, to give journalists and news organizations the power online that they once had offline — the power of distribution, the power of Google and Digg on the web — a power that, completely counter to the monopoly distribution model, journalism can only have collectively.

Remember the rule of networks on the web — the bigger the network, the more powerful it is.

There’s much more to this vision — such as a solution to the problem of rampant gaming that plagues Digg and Google, and the value of link journalism as content (as Jack has discovered) — but I want to see if the networked link journalism meme catches first. (If at first you don’t succeed, try another meme.)