Also: Newspapers fear change | El Pais' citizen journalism section | Viacom dodges takedown lawsuit
Now this is exciting: Newsvine, which is pretty much the best looking, best functioning news site on the web, is relaunching today with a new version called "Evergreen".
I can't rave about this site enough. Since it launched in March last year I have struggled to find another site that comes close to this one. Sky web designers, take note.
So a year after launch, what have the guys decided to change?
The most common request (they designed the site around what users wanted - how wacky!) was for a more customisable home page. "My homepage" custom options on other news sites aren't really the answer, they argue, because most users still prefer the home page overview. The answer, they say, is a modular homepage that echoes something like Netvibes. The main blocks like top story and most popular seed remain, but after that things start getting draggable and you can close modules you don't use.
They have added more localised content, which is very interesting - the last thing local newspapers need is a site as good as Newsvine muscling in. The site identifies the user's location by their IP address, and then serves up local weather and news headlines from a few hundred local news feeds it has gathered.
Other adds include a news in pictures features (which is great, because they aren't afraid to use 'em big), a visualisation tool and an option to bring in any external RSS feed, and not just choose form the ones they list. That means I can add the RSS feed of my Gmail then. Must go home and play with this...
None of this is that radical, but it is just executed so damn well. Great stuff. Top marks. Everybody else - must try harder.
Newspapers and the fear of change
Here's something we probably knew already, but it's awfully nice to get confirmation: the biggest challenge for the newspaper industry is overcoming its own monopolistic culture. This was written about the US industry, but how much of this is still relevant in the UK?
Consultant Miles Groves, who used to be chief economist for the Newspaper Association of America, says publishers see their job as getting the paper off the presses every morning and into trucks. There's not much room there for thinking about or responding to transition, and that breeds the aversion to risk.
"Newspapers are afraid of failure. It's out of that fear of failure that a lot of innovation doesn't happen."
That failure to invent has let young, more creative companies move in, like Monster and Craigslist in the advertising space. Groves - who, at a guess, will make a buck or two selling his consultancy services on the back of these observations - adds denial and arrogance to the list of crimes by newspapers. The conclusion is inevitably that newspapers still don't do enough to allow their readers to participate.
"The DNA is just not there to do what needs to be done. If a newspaper doesn't already have a strong information strategy and can't already tell you who its readers are and what they like, if they haven't already tied online and print together, I have no optimism they can turn it around and make it different. It's too late. I have no hope for some."
That's enough stone-throwing from my glass house. (Media Life)
El Pais launches citJ feature
Spanish newspaper El Pais has introduced a new section called "Yo Periodismo" for citizen journalism which invites users to send text, photos and video contributions. Those contributions are edited by El Pais journalists for clarity, accuracy and for any legal problems. There's not much space for comment or opinion here though - submissions are limited to 200 characters. (Editors' Weblog)
Viacom dodges takedown lawsuit
Viacom has admitted a bit of over-zealous YouTube hammering (we need a sexier name for issuing a takedown notice for YouTube...) in which it ordered YouTube to remove a totally legitimate parody video made by someone else.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, who love this kind of thing, teamed up with the Stanford Fair Use Project to issue a lawsuit against Viacom, saying the clips of the Colbert Report used in the spoof were well within the bounds of fair use. At the time of the takedown, Viacom said it had no problem with the clip and said the takedown request "most likely did not come from us".
There will be more and more of these baby-with-the-bathwater problems, reckons Variety, as big media hones its systematic trawling of content sharing sites and the subsequent takedown demands. EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann welcomed Viacom's announcement that it would set up a rapid-response email address so that producers could easily contest this kind of takedown notice.
"If copyright owners are going to be sending hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices, they also have a responsibility to protect the legitimate free speech rights of the citizen creators who rely on platforms like YouTube." (Variety)
