links for 2007-01-18

“The Association of Online Publishers held a forum on this yesterday where CNET and Yahoo! both gave case studies on building communities around content.”

“…now that everyone can see the release reporters have to do some proper research on the background.”

John Robinson: “the j-schools are underserving aspiring journalists in terms of their multi-media knowledge…. our experience is that the student fresh out of journalism school or with one or two years of experience are hungry to experiment and learn ne

Are British journalists better at holding their politicians to account than American journalists? Bob Giles of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard seems to think so. (Hat tip: CJRDaily)

“Some bloggers also applauded British journalists’ comparative unwillingness to yield when politicians offer soft answers (or non-answers) to hard questions.”

Yahoo’s Steven Taylor tells Jemima Kiss that publling blog posts “is the worth thing you can do”. Why? “The debate will emerge somewhere else – it’s just a very bad policy.”

“The BBC is set to recruit dozens of advertising executives as it looks to bolster its website income. The corporation is close to approving a plan under which advertising will be sold on its websites that can be viewed by those living outside the UK.”

Ryan Sholin has a theory about why Backfence is in trouble: “Because people don’t want to participate in your brand, they want to participate in their community. … No one wants to connect with your brand, they want to connect with their town”

CNET’s Suzie Daniels: “Digital publishers should not lose sight of the fact that professional editorial remains their “centre of gravity”, and is the main reason why users want to be part of their community in the first place”

Graham Holliday on Bobbie Johnson’s reporting from Macworld and CES: “I have to question why bother with mutliple formats?”

The number of people reading blogs on the top 10 US newspaper sites more than tripled year-on-year in December, and provided a larger share of their total traffic, according to Nielson//NetRatings.

Chris Anderson’s Vanishing Point theory of news: “our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us.”