DigitalEdge

Welcome to the Digital Edge Blog! The Digital Edge Blog focuses on developments, trends, best practices and more in newspaper digital media. The blog launched in 2006 (archives before August 2008 are here). We look forward to reading your comments and contributions to the Digital Edge Blog. Questions? E-mail Beth Lawton at beth.lawton@naa.org.

A few more innovative projects and a reading list for this last Digital Edge blog post of 2008.

New York Times Launches Interactive Op-Ed Feature
The New York Times plans to create an instant "op-ed" feature where experts can comment on breaking news. Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal said a team of editorial writers and Web people are gathering a list of experts on a variety of topics that they could call on to send in comments, columns or op-eds on breaking or daily news. See Editor & Publisher for more details.

The Big Picture at Boston.com
Boston.com's Big Picture feature draws attention to great photojournalism at 990 px wide. MediaPost reported:

"Alan Taylor, a Web developer at the Boston Globe, created The Big Picture after noticing that the impact of very powerful wire photographs was being lost because of their tiny display size. He wanted a way to display the photos in as large a size as possible to allow them to speak for themselves. "'You get big beautiful images off the wire that were put at the top of an article in a very small frame,' Taylor told me, during a phone interview, "I thought it could be better. We've got these images and we're a news and storytelling organization. Let's do it.'"

Learn how he did it here.

Reading List

For many of you, the holidays mean a lot of family time. (Lots and lots of family time....)  So when you need a break from all that togetherness, pull out this reading list:

The Use of the Internet by America's Largest Newspapers (The Bivings Group)

Every year, the Bivings Group surveys the top 100 newspaper Web sites to gague what they're doing online and in other digital media spaces. Some of the conclusions from the 2008 report:

• Newspapers are experimenting with user-generated content.  The study found that 58 percent of newspapers allowed for user-generated photos, while 18 percent accepted video and 15 percent articles.  Overall, 58 percent of newspapers offered some form of user-generated content in 2008 compared to 24 percent in 2007.
• Integration with external social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us has increased dramatically the last few years: 92 percent of newspapers now include this option compared to only 7 percent in 2006.
• The number of Web sites requiring registration to view most content (free or paid) has decreased from 2007.  Now only 11 percent of Web sites require registration to view full articles, compared to 29 percent in 2007 and 23 in 2006.

Download the report for more.

Also see this comment about the report from News After Newspapers blogger Martin Langeveld

News and Information as Digital Media Comes of Age  (Berkman Center, Harvard University)

News organizations should invest in research to better monitor and understand the changing media environment and reinvent their idea of news coverage to better serve the increasingly digital audience.

Those were just some of the conclusions in a new report from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The report, "News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age," "aimed to identify areas where core journalism functions in a democracy are at stake and where there is potential for the networked digital media environment to offer something richer and more representative than anything previously available."

Available with the report are several related essays. Download the report and related pieces here.

Here's an excerpt from the report overview:

The U.S. media system was not handed down from the heavens on tablets. It's time to look at models from other countries - stronger public media, newspapers less dependent on advertising, etc. We do a lot of studying of online activity, but we don't know nearly enough about how real people in the real world take in information from many sources and what that means for how journalism in the public interest needs to evolve. We, the people who care about the public getting the information it needs, must take the best from both worlds to build the media we need.

Online Innovator Awards
The Newspaper Association of America's Digital Media Federation is still taking entries for the Online Innovator Award. Deadline: January 9, 2009.

Nielsen Online Data
And, finally, here's Nielsen Online's Top 30 News and Current Events Destinations (ranked by sessions per user) for November 2008.  Click here to download the Excel spreadsheet (you must be signed in to the NAA Community to access this file).

Happy Holidays!
Have a wonderful holiday season, happy new year and best wishes for a better 2009! We'll return in January.

About Beth Lawton