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Posts Tagged ‘editor’

I’m at the NewsMorphosis Conference in Hawaii today locked in a day of debates about the state of news quality and how the hell we find a business model to keep paying for it. It’s a big issue locally– earlier this year three of Hawaii’s five largest TV news stations merged operations and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is  merging with the other daily paper the Honolulu Advertiser, resulting in plenty of layoffs and general civic concern.

So it’s fitting that the conference ended with a talk by John Temple, the editor of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News site, a test case in how the future of local news could work. And thankfully, we finally got a few more details on the site and the approach.

Temple was clear to say “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to fixing the media business, but also sees a great deal of hope in the volatility– this from the guy who was head of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, a paper that’s already gone through what so many dailies are dreading.

“We’re not trying to reinvent a local newspaper and put it on the Web,” he said. Indeed, the mission of Peer News doesn’t even contain the words “news” or “media” or “paper.” It’s simply “to create a new civic square.” Core to the development of Peer were three questions:

-What is the role of a free press in a democracy?

-How would you best fulfill that on a local level using all the tools available today?

-How do you do that in a sustainable way?

On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with “articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which journalists have traditional covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a living history on a topic that changes as it develops.” There will no longer be a sense of “missing” an article, because the “articles” will be living things. That also addresses the critique that local news swarms around one issue, then moves on. “We’re not going to be hot topic driven,” Temple says. Going back to those questions, Temple says the role of a free press is to inform citizens so they can make intelligent decisions. “Let’s stop making it so difficult,” he said.

The other hallmark of Peer’s approach is what has made blogs popular– a sense of community. But it’s certainly a different approach. For one thing, Peer won’t have “reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community.  “In this era, the fact that newspapers still rewrite press releases is an embarrassment,” Temple said. “We’re not going to be stenographers. I think that’s a downfall of journalism.”

But for a site that intends to be very community oriented, there was one big shocker: Peer will not have comments. “(Comments) descend into racism, hate, ugliness and reflect badly on news organizations that have them,” said Temple. Why? Because people do not have to show their faces when they comment so there’s no sense of responsibility, he argued. “We think anonymity is a huge problem when it comes to comments,” he said.

Temple also emphasized that the coverage would not pull punches: “We’re going to call things like we see them. We think there’s real value in taking a stand.”

So what about that business model? As Temple noted, there aren’t that many business models out there to chose from. Unlike most media sites, this will be a member site that people “value and will pay for.” He added “advertising would not be a key focus for us.”

Peer should be launching early next quarter, so we’ll be able to see more of these ideas in action soon. But it’s clear that the site– or “news service” as it prefers to call itself– is taking a markedly different approach from old and what we consider “new” media right now.

And with the benefit of some of these details, it seems less out of step for Omidyar to be starting this company. EBay, after all, was one of the first sites to powerfully leverage community on the Web, pioneering a lot of the systems of trust and reputation we still use today.

(More on Temple’s blog here.)

AOL has recruited a few celebrity chefs and foodies; including Curtis Stone, Food & Wine’s Gail Simmons, and Marcus Samuelsson; and the famed Culinary Institute of America to launch food website KitchenDaily. Similar to Epicurious, AllRecipes, or FoodNetwork.com, KitchenDaily features a recipe database of meals that have been tested by top chefs, food magazine and cookbook publishers.

AOL has recruited a number of talent from Conde Nast’s recently shuttered Gourmet Magazine. Former Gourmet Editor Cheryl Brown is the editor-in-chief with a number of former Gourmet writers named as contributors. Epicurious’ Megan Steintrager will be the senior editor of the site.

In addition to recipes, KitchenDaily will feature a meal-planner tool, cooking lessons, cookbook reviews, and and more than 250 instructional videos created by celebrity chefs and industry insiders. AOL already has a food blog called Slashfood though its unclear how the two sites will be integrated.

The recipe site space is crowded, with a number of worthy competitors vying for traffic. And even Microsoft’s Bing launched its own recipe search product. But its seems that KitchenDaily aims to be part magazine, part recipe site, so it may be able to differentiate itself and possibly attract many former Gourmet readers. We know that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is bullish on niche content so the launch of this site fits into the company’s strategy nicely.

SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.

Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show “Next” with vidchat capabilities.

Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit “Next” anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The “Report video as inappropriate” button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn’t provide much of a threat.

I pressed “play” last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on “Next” encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of “camera disabled” chats, two women who automatically clicked “Next” once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese “fan of Google” and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether “I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman” in the hope that I would be the former.

Out of the 10,920 of my fellow Chatroulette participants, my “Roulettees” were a good cross section of Internet humanity. And while I did not encounter the “suicide” hanging videos alluded to in many of the chats, things like “did you hear the one about the guy who shot himself in the bath tub,” were brought up in conversation quite a few times, as examples of just how crazy Chatroulette can get.

Anywhere you get a mass of people communicating uncensored (and yes much like 4chan.org, China has not yet blocked Chatroulette) will be subject to typical groupthink behavior like urban myths and requests for interaction better left to the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Nonetheless, the service’s potential for more substantial acts of communication is formidable.

Chatroulette is what you’d expect it to be, micro-interactive reality TV with a large heaping of cybersex. While most people are (whether they admit it or not) voyeurs – the fact that Chatroulette lets the both participants see each other limits the site’s potential user base to the weirdos – and despite piquing VC Fred Wilson’s interest it doesn’t seem like there’s currently enough weirdos to turn the humble startup into something mainstream.

One “Roulettee,” when asked what he thought the service was most useful for, responded, “connecting with people around the world.” Yeah, and asking them to show you their boobs.

I don’t want to write about Le Web this year. Really I don’t.

This time last year, while I was still at the Guardian, I stumbled back to my Parisian hotel room at the end of the first day of the conference and fired off a thousand words rounding up the highs and not-insignificant lows of the event. Those words, along with the title my editor added to them - Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference! – have followed me around ever since.

The truth is, I’m bored with Le Web. I’m bored with the expectation that I’ll be reviewing it again this year. I’m bored with Loic’s clever (and relatively successful) ploy to get me on-side by asking me to moderate a panel called The European Gang. And most of all I’m bored with Maslovian jokes about heat, food and wifi.

But fortunately this year I’m not at the Guardian. And fortunately twenty-seven-thousand of my TechCrunch colleagues were in attendance at LeWeb 09 to provide proper coverage of the event so I don’t have to write an entire column about it. Was it worth going? Sure – I was in London anyway, I didn’t pay for my ticket or accommodation (I stayed in a friend’s family apartment) and it’s always fun to dick around in Paris with my friends. Should you have been there too? That depends.

If you’ve ever been to a conference in the Valley then you’ve seen most of the stars – Marissa Mayer, Jack Dorsey et al before, so probably not. All of the big announcements – the PeekFon, Jolicloud’s netbook OS, Twitter’s upcoming Chirp conference, and the company’s imminent acquisition by Google – were covered by TechCrunch Europe. If you live in Europe and can’t justify a trip west, then sure. It’s was a really professionally-put-together conference, with A-list speakers, giving a taste of America without having to get on a plane. You’ve probably already had to make the same decision about Eurodisney.

Beyond that, there’s not really much I can say – except that the administrative problems from last year were resolved (kudos Geraldine and Loic) – if anything it was too warm, and the only wifi problems were in the speakers’ hotel. The only speakers I saw were Yossi Vardi who looked like a mad old uncle who had just discovered YouTube, and Queen Rania of Jordan whose speech was my highlight of the conference – not for the content (which was clearly written by someone else) but rather for Loic’s brilliantly obsequious “fank you your majesty” response. Good to see the French bowing and scraping to royalty again. That can only end well.

More from this week on TechCrunch after the jump…

Nothing to declare of the week:

Back in San Francisco, the CrunchPad saga continues to rumble on, and I continue to be banned from writing about it by The Man. You can read The Man’s take on it here.

Non-prospering cheat of the week:

Moving swiftly on – Apple has stamped down on a lying, cheating developer by removing over 1000 apps from its App Store. The apps, built by ‘Molinker’, had attacked a sea of positive reviews, almost all of which appeared to be written by people associated with the developer. iPhone blog iPhoneography smelled a rat and emailed Apple VP Phil Shiller with their suspicions. Days later the apps were removed. Cheats, after all, never prosper.

Planet of the apps of the week:

December 7th 2009 will be remembered for many things – the 68th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the 30th anniversary of my birth – but most importantly of all, for the launch of Google Goggles – the moment when the Internet gained the power of sight. Make no mistake; when your great, great grandchildren sit in their computer-controlled prison cells, breaking digital rocks for their robot overlords, wondering when it all went wrong, this will be the moment they’ll rue. The moment when their ancestors’ Droid phones were first able to identify words and basic shapes and begin to plan their escape. Dystopian future? There’s an app for that. (Still, at least we can watch it all happen in real time.)

Privacy is dead of the week:

More evil-ness, this time from Facebook which has rolled out a new set of privacy controls. Jason sums it up neatly, thus: “Facebook is spinning the news as a win for users. They’re supposedly getting more control than ever over what they’re sharing, and it’s easier than ever to control it. But that’s not the real story. Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb has nailed it: this is Facebook’s move to push people to share with the public.” Arrington and Andrew ‘amateur hater’ Keen had an argument at Le Web over whether (as the former claimed) ‘privacy is dead’. Between Facebook and this week’s launch of Blippy – a service that allows you to broadcast your credit card transactions – it’s certainly not looking well.

And finally of the week:

And finally, Friendster has been bought by Malaysian Payments Company MOL Global. I give precisely as much of a shit about the news as you do.

Have a great week!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This week’s big story – unless you count news that matters outside the world of TechCrunch – is the End the CrunchPad. Killed, says Arrington, by ‘greed, jealousy and miscommunication’. Basically the same things that killed Jesus, New Coke and Haley Joel Osment at the end of Pay It Forward.

Dick Move Of The Week
This week marks the start of a new regular feature. Entitled ‘Dick Move Of The Week’ it will celebrate people or companies who go out of their way to shatter dreams, waste time and effort or generally move in the manner of a dick. This week’s recipient is Craigslist, for reasons perfectly articulated in this story by Jason Kincaid…

“Developers take note: if you’ve got a mashup built off of Craigslist’s data, don’t even think about showing it to anyone who works there. At least, that’s the lesson learned by developer Romy Maxwell, who says that Craigslist has blocked both his mashup and every single project built on Yahoo Pipes a few days after a friendly Email exchange he had with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.”

To be fair to Craig, this seems to be less of a problem with Craig (who denies any personal knowledge of the decision) and more a decision by ‘Slist – but the fact remains that anyone who uses Yahoo Pipes to hack their Craigslist experience has now completely wasted their time. Dick Move Of The Week.

Acquisitions Of The Week
In happier news, it seems that the Internet giants are indulging in some earlyish holiday shopping with Google buying AppJet, Amazon à acheter Vente-Privee and Apple reportedly in talks to acquire music service LaLa. The latter provided a particularly colourful TechCrunch post with Jason heading down to LaLa’s office to get the scoop.

“I walked over to the Lala office, which is only a few blocks from us, to see if I could gather any more details. They didn’t seem particularly happy to see me. I knocked on the door and a Lala employee answered, keeping the door half shut so that I couldn’t see in. I asked if any of the company’s executives were around. He looked over his shoulder, asked if they were, and a second later said they weren’t (it was not a particularly convincing effort). He promptly shut the door, and I’m pretty sure I heard someone inside say something to the effect of ‘Are you serious, don’t answer it!’.”

Cowards! You can’t hide from the news.

Jugaad Of The Week
Editor at Large Sarah Lacy continues to live up to her entirely made up job title this week with the last of her dispatches from India. First up she taught us a new word, asking Can India “Jugaad” Its Way To More Angel Investing? “Jugaad”, Sarah explains, describes “an innate creativity for problem solving, and it’s what’s allowing a small group of Indian entrepreneurs to shortcut years of market evolution to bring angel investment to Indian technology startups.

It’s also a quality much in evidence at SMSONE – a micro-local news service that uses basic SMS to bring vitally important news to un-wired rural communities. For those commenters who whine every time TechCrunch writes  another story about Valley-focused smart phone driven playthings like FourSquare, these two posts are for you.

Plastic Fantastic Of The Week
Speaking of Valley-focused smart phone driven playthings, December kicked off with the unveiling of ‘Square’ – a new mobile credit card payment service by Jim McKelvey and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. Finally the age-old problem of hookers accepting credit cards has been solved – no wonder the company has a $40million valuation before it has even launched. Hell, if McKelvey and Dorsey move fast, there’s still time for them to win an Obama-style pre-emptive Crunchie.

Goodbye Of The Week
And finally, in Good-News-Bad-News-news, Chicago-based group-buying site ‘Groupon’, which sounds like the name of a medical clamp, has raised $30million from Accel. This is of course great news for the company, but it’s also bad news for TechCrunch HQ as it means the brilliant Leena Rao is moving to Chicago where her husband Suneel has just accepted a job as Groupon’s VP of Product Development. Congratulations Suneel – but we’ll miss you, Leena.

Happy Digg.com day everyone!

Seriously.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We’ve had a chance to play SGN’s Skies Of Glory WWI person-to-person dogfighting game for the iPhone. But now they’ve released this trailer for the game to really show off what they’ve built. Look for a launch date shortly.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Our last Friday Giveaway was a Sonos S5 Wireless Music System. This week Kodak was kind enough to hand us a Zi8 pocket video camera, and one of you is going to have it in your hands shortly.

CrunchGear’s overview of the Zi8 is here. This is a Flip-like picked video camera that records in 1080p high definition. The device includes a SD/SDHC card slot for expandable storage. And the best feature is this – the Zi8 has an external microphone jack to help get decent audio into the device. Poor audio has plagued the Flip cameras.

Here’s how you can get the device. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. The contest ends at noon California time on Saturday. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible. Kodak is generously donating the device and we’re covering the shipping costs. If you aren’t lucky enough to get the free one, you can buy the Zi8 for $177 here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Are you a student or shut-in? Are you a fan of electronic devices

Go here to read the rest:
NYC intern needed

For many people, the term “Scavenger Hunt” conjures childhood memories of running around the neighborhood on a quest for knickknacks like thimbles and socks — an experience that loses its luster beyond the age of ten or so. But as it turns out, they’re big businesses: major corporations and universities have successfully used more elaborate scavenger hunts as team building exercises, and a well-designed course can be extremely fun. SCVNGR is one young startup that’s managed to tap into this niche market very successfully, and today it’s launching a new consumer platform that will allow anyone to build their own scavenger hunts, which will work with any mobile phone. The new platform, called XPLR, is now in private beta, and the first 100 TechCrunch readers to go here and enter the code ‘TECHCRUNCH’ will be able to sign up and build their own missions.

In conjunction with the news, the company is also announcing that it has closed a $750,000 funding round from Highland Capital.

SCVNGR is still a very new company, making its debut last fall as part of the DreamIT incubator program. But it’s already seen use by over 300 universities, including Harvard and Princeton, as well as corporations, who have used the company’s enterprise-grade game builder for things like employee team building excercises and orientation events. It’s a fantastic idea for a number of reasons: games are easily deployable with little to no cost outside of licensing the platform, it works on any cell phone, and games can be tweaked with a minimal amount of effort.

XPLR (pronounced ‘explorer’) is meant to serve as a more accessible framework to build these games. And, unlike the more robust SCVNGR builder, XPLR is free. It comes with a number of restictions: you’re limited by how many people can play the game simultaneously, you can’t tell which users have been playing (as you might want to in a commercial app), and the platform is only for non-commercial, non-institutional use. But if you wanted to set up a tour of your hometown, or perhaps a barcrawl for your friends to follow, this is exactly what you’d want to use. You can see a screenshot of the editor below.

So how do the games actually work? If you’d like to try one out for yourself, there’s a free application for the iPhone that includes a training game, but here’s the gist of it: the service sends questions to the phone, oftentimes alongside a text, audio, or video clue to help figure out the answer. Once you think you’ve solved it, you type in your solution and if you’re right, you proceed to the next question. The system works fine as a basic puzzle game, but it’s far more engaging when it’s used for scavenger hunts, with questions that require you to actually walk to a certain landmark. For example, there are a number of SCVNGR missions set up for the city of Boston, which guide users through some of the city’s most well known landmarks. Here’s an example series of questions, taken from a Philadelphia tour:

Clue: Which is greater? This stairs in this famous staircase in Philadelphia or the sequels in this never-ending saga?
Answer: Rocky Steps
Challenge: Great! Now run there and tell me, on the statue of Rocky at the top, what size shoes is he wearing?
Answer (obtained by looking very carefully at Rocky’s shoes): 9.5
An alternate challenge could have been: Now take a photo of your and your team doing the Rocky Pose at the top! Send in the photo to move on!

SCVNGR offers apps for iPhone and Android, but they’re also playable on more basic phones too using SMS (just sent a special keyword to the company’s shortcode and the game will start sending you clues). That said, the smartphone experience is definitely better: some games include multimedia clues, and there are also special photo missions that ask users to submit pictures of themselves doing various tasks. These photos get uploaded to the site’s server, and whoever is running the mission can then distribute them as mementos later on.

SCVNGR is really doing a great job with its service, and its impressive roster of customers is a testament to that. We’ll be keeping an eye on them in the future.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

No joke, I just received my obituary in the mail today at the office. Apparently, I died while surfing at Rockaway on Monday, July 6th. That’s news to me.

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Peter Ha died on July 6, 2009