I’ve stumbled across these sites/services and think they have great potential in helping news orgs grow audience. Also a link to a great article about Promising Practices In Online Engagement.
First let’s start with a few links to some fascinating articles I’ve read recently,
Promising Practices In Online Engagement By Scott Bittle, Chris Haller and Alison Kadlec
1. Managing News
About Managing News
RSS/Atom based news tracker with search, republishing and mapping.
Features
- Aggregate RSS/Atom news
- Show news as list or on a map
- Search news
- Republish news by bundling articles into channels
- Configurable location tagging
- Configurable maps
Designed and developed by Development Seed.
The Knight Foundation helped fund key module development to improve Drupal’s mapping and aggregation tools.
2. Game Changer
Local sports coverage is a great audience builder! I can imagine this app taking off! Have a look.
GameChanger provides mobile apps and online tools that collect, manage and distribute statistics and play-by-play updates for youth and high school sports. Our iPhone app replaces the existing “pencil and paper” processes for scorekeeping and stat management. Play-by-play content and stats (the “GameStream”)collected by the GameChanger app are accessible anytime, anywhere by fans, parents and local news outlets.
3. Outside.in
Outside.in for Publishers powers hyperlocal news for web sites of all sizes across the US. The service allows publishers to create and customize discrete Neighborhood News Pages for every community in their market. With self-service tools, it’s easy to leverage Outside.in’s database of aggregated feeds from mainstream media and blogs, all organized by neighborhood.
What’s more, we let you curate the content: you choose which stories and sources to show on your pages and you customize your Neighborhood News Pages to any style, size, and color to fit the design of your site.
4. ForkFly
I love the idea of mobile coupons for local merchants. How about a partnership with ForkFly or suggest your news org create their own apps like this. Just a thought.
5.YouTubeDirect
enjoy,
-koci
One Response
YouTube direct has a minor set-back, in my opinion. Well maybe it’s not so minor, in fact the more I think of it, the more injust it seems.
Anyone who puts a video on YouTube direct that is subsequently used by a news organization, whether it is broadcast on the air or used on their site, gets absolutely no renumeration for their content. These news organizations frequently bleed out thousands of dollars to “professional” photographers and video crews for the rights to use their content.
So the distinction here is what exactly? The quality of the product? I think fundamentally if the content is interesting enough to publish, that right there gives it its value. So why is it that amateurs or citizen journalists shouldn’t be given the recognition and reward they deserve for their interesting and newsworthy uploads?
Well, that’s perhaps a bit of a no-brainer…it’s not in news publishers’ best interest to pay YouTube users (thus breaking a hideous precedent set in the infancy of YouTube itself).
The moral of the story is, if you have newsworthy footage (or pictures) and don’t wish to be exploited by media outlets, find an alternative to YouTube direct, and YouTube altogether. There are only a few agencies out there at the moment who deal specifically with user-generated news images that offer payment if the image is used, my favorite being Citizenside.com.
They are like brokers between amateurs and news publishers, working for a fair price and protecting the rights of their members. Plus, they are part-owned by the AFP (3rd largest news agency in the world) and have access to all the AFP’s thousands of clients around the globe, meaning maximum exposure for your news-related content.
It’s time amateurs got some recognition for their efforts, and stopped playing into this exploitative maneuver by YouTube and the media moguls.