Friday News Roundup

Below are commentary and links to stories I thought were interesting, but not big enough to sustain a separate post.

Our good friend and multimedia maven Dr. Syb passed along this post from Fast Company: "Where are the Women in Tech and Social Media?" The article notes that gatherings in these industries tend to be filled with white men and bemoans the lack of diversity.

I have turned into a real technology/software geek, always looking for the newest and the best to be had. So I loved this post on the SocialMedia.biz blog on "Coolest power tools of some top geeks." In it, the geeks wax poetic about the tools they can't live without. Some of my personal favs are: HootSuite and Tweetdeck for Twitter, Google Blogger for this blog, Flickr to manage my more than 4,000 pictures, my Flip Video camera (I hope to be a power user like Charles Robinson when I grow up), my Belkin 5-Outlet Mini Surge Protector, my iPod Touch and Skype to record my podcasts. What can you not live without?

This story brought up some interesting questions for me, someone who has almost 5,000 photos on Flickr. The UK's Sky News was searching for a photo to use in a story about a shooting at the Waterloo Tube station, according to the Online Journalism Blog. it ended up using shots it found on Twitpic taken by Joseph Neale. The problem was, they didn't tell Neale they were doing this. Neale found out and emailed Sky News for 2 weeks about compensation, to no avail. So he posted the following Tweet: “Newscorp use your photos without permission but have plans to charge for reading their content." He used the #skypic hashtag and it was the Tweet heard 'round the world. In the end, Sky News paid Neale.

Looking to create your own new business model for the newspaper industry? Let the City University of New York (CUNY) help. CUNY's graduate school of journalism blog has an interesting post with information on those business models, along with dowloadable documents and resources to help you on your way.

Speaking of business models, the U.K.'s Financial Times is feeling vindicated over its decision back in 2002 to charge for content on its web site, according to a New York Times interview with chief executive John Ridding. “It was pretty lonely out there for a while in paid land,” he told the Times. “But it has become pretty clear that advertising alone is not going to sustain online business models. Quality journalism has to be paid for.”

Let's file this item under nature-abhors-a-vacuum: the Techdirt blog asks "But Who Will Do Investigative Reporting Without Newspapers?" Why, sites like The Smoking Gun, which nailed a group of telephone pranksters causing mayhem across the country and outing them all, said the blog.

And we'll end this post with an interesting gem from the Nieman Journalism Lab blog. Writer Zachary Stewart offers gems from a media conference on the future of journalism featuring New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Time magazine's Walter Isaacson. "Sulzberger indicated awareness that online competition would force newspapers to focus on unique and and in-depth reporting over easily replicable contentm" wrote Stewart. And Isaacson said: "We’ve not yet decided or announced how we’re going to charge, but we are going to charge, and I think we feel comfortable with a monthly subscription charge that involves a certain loyalty to a product, probably to a package of products initially." Why are these quotes interesting? They were made back in 1995. And Stewart notes the same issues are being argued some 14 years later.

Enjoy your weekend!