Grading news applications on the iPhone

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Mindy McAdams graded news apps on the iPhone 3G:

Bloomberg LP doesn’t have any pictures or video, but whew! It loads fast and navigates fast. It updated a few times in the 24-hour span from Saturday to Sunday night; I’m betting that will only increase Monday. Note that you can input your own stocks, including the number of shares you own, for price updates. Grade: A

Bloomberg on the iPhone 3G

They sold 1 million 3G iPhones over the weekend. Looks like it’s time to set up one of those iPhone plugins for WordPress. Gots to make this place look pretty on the new shiny!

Can old media get agile?

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Signal vs. Noise sez:

We stalled launching our Job Board for a while because we felt we had bigger fish to fry. Once we got around to it, we couldn’t believe we had waited so long. It was easy to set up, a great resource for our community, and has generated lots of cash for the company.

There’s more than one way to skin the revenue cat.

They go on to suggest that this is a virtue of being a small, agile company.

This is something new and webby. In the before times, diversification took gobs of capital, either for R&D or aquisitions. Now you can just code up a job board, and bang! Your software company is a recruiting company.

Form, by carlosluis
Form, by carlosluis

Are old media too big to use the web like this? Maybe not.

The New York Times is getting into the game (quoting Matter/Anti-Matter):

In essence, this means the Times is turning into a software company, applying the same business model philosophy “as many start-ups in Silicon Valley:” “Build neat tools, get traction, and then figure out how to make money off them later,” as the Silicon Alley Insider describes it.

Whaddya think?

The SVN post also gives props to Apple – not a small company, but one with killer leadership. Do media execs even *want* to be agile? Or have they got too much mass?

Tell your story with data, without writing a line of code

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I’ve been on the hunt for quick and dirty ways to show off data: visualization tools that are free, pretty, and easy to embed in a story.  Here are my finds so far.

Kick-ass embeddable visualizations

Upload your data set to ManyEyes, and you can turn it into all kinds of neat charts and wacky interactive stuff like word trees. They make it really easy to share. Click on the “share this” link below any visualization to get a snippet of HTML to paste into a story.

Amy Gahran loves word trees too:

You specify a word or phrase, and ManyEyes shows you all the different contexts in which that string appears in a tree-like branching structure. This helps reveal recurring themes in the document, and shows how topics and subtopics are related.

The other hot ManyEyes demo is the government expenses visualization. Use the menu on the left to drill down into spending categories. (Can you find the S&L bailout?)

There are so many kick-ass things you can make with ManyEyes: tree maps, tag clouds, and bubble charts, to name just a few. Here’s a map!

Timelines get sexy

It’s easy to make sweet, interactive timelines with circaVie. Like, really easy. Sign up, click “start a timeline” and add events. Like ManyEyes, they also make it simple to embed a widget, just paste in the provided snippet.

http://www.circavie.com/flash/timeline.swf
Text message scandal timeline by DFP Graphics

Words are pretty

Wordle makes pretty text visualizations by shuffling words from a file, web page, etc., and sizing the words based on how frequently they occur. Much simpler than a word tree, but sometimes simple is just what you need.

Sixth W on Wordle

Need a map, fast?

Google’s Charts API is suuuper cool.  It can make you bar charts, maps, venn diagrams, even sparklines.  But it’s a tool for web developers, so it’s a bit chewy to use if you’re not familiar with a few things.

Lucky for us, lots of folks have built tools to make it easier. The Google Chart Creator is one of the better ones.  I made this map in under a minute.

Google chart map of the Middle East

What else?

It feels like I give the NYT props every day for their data viz skillz. Their stuff is pretty and awesome, but they’ve got a team of developers, designers and whiz-bang specialists.

What other tools are out there that make it simple to create embeddable news visuals, sans a staff of flash savants?

Surviving newspapers: don’t get caught in the undertow

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Are we sinking or sunk?  Alfred Hermida writes that, at least in Canada, new research shows that nobody buys the paper for local news:

The main reason for choosing newspapers was out of habit. People were either daily readers or subscribers.

But only 8% said they choose newspapers because they were a source of local news. And even less said it was because they like holding a physical paper.

101_2510 by Br3nda
101_2510 by Br3nda

How to keep your head above water

Amy Gahran, Swimming Lessons for Journalists:

So where will today’s journos find tomorrow’s jobs? Here’s my take: Not in news organizations. At least, not in news orgs as we’ve grown accustomed to them over the last century. That ship is quite obviously sinking.

Mindy McAdams, The survival of journalism, 10 simple facts:

Newspapers were a nice business. Publishers could make the product insanely cheap (remember the penny press), and the advertising would cover the expenses, plus generate fantastic profits. However, this is clearly over. It’s done. It worked for a long time, but now, like trans-Atlantic leisure travel in big passenger ships, it will never work again.

Woot, ProPublica! LA Times, fail. A win for not-for-profit news.

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From Journalism.co.uk:

Yesterday afternoon it emerged that two more journalists would likely be leaving the LA Times, but not as a direct result of the editorial cuts.

According to LA Observed, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber will be leaving the paper later in the summer to join the not-for-profit investigative start up ProPublica.

Increasing shareholder value is orthogonal to the mission of journalism.  We’re here to enable democracy, not to make a buck.  This may be bad news for the LA Times, but it’s good news for the future of journalism.