The view in the Caf:
Step Sing, “Samford University’s most time-honored tradition. Since 1951, students” have been preoccupied from their classes while producing this song and dance revue show. It takes place this weekend. There are 14 teams competing for top honors. Thousands of people (tickets sell out in about an hour) will come onto campus to see the shows, which donate large sums to their annual philanthropy benefactor — this year it is Cornerstone Schools of Alabama.
The shows are great fun, very clever, inventive and entertaining. But the banners may be my favorite part.
And, yes, I went to lunch early, which is why the tables are empty in the photograph. There were things to do. There was a trip to take. I had to travel to Tuscaloosa to get a piece of paper filled out. One piece of paper, five signatures, or, more precisely, initials. This can’t be done electronically or by fax, because it has always been done the old fashioned way, I guess. I figured I wouldn’t get all five people, and I did not.
That was a three hour round trip for two sets of initials.
At least I got to see this:
Classic.
Late night for the student-journalists at the Crimson. Step Sing has an effect on everything. When I left sometime after 10 p.m. most of the staffers were still working on their dance steps. So they won’t sleep much. The things you can do when you’re young, right?
Things to read: Who advertises on news sites and how much those ads are targeted:
A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.
Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.
[…]
Overall, the analysis finds that while news organizations have tried to persuade their advertisers to buy space across multiple platforms, there was little evidence that they had succeeded. The kinds of products and services being advertised online were quite different than in legacy platforms, and often were seen across multiple websites.
Interesting findings, but they were only looking at the front page of sites. A lot of traffic comes from search engines, directly into interior pages. Indeed, many front pages aren’t built for the human aesthetic, but rather for the search engine spiders.
Sites selling specific ad space, or clients buying ads exclusively on sports pages or on automotive stories, don’t seem to figure into this. That’s worth studying (or practicing) but it would be incredibly labor intensive.
Seven ways the New York Times is using social media for ‘deeper’ engagement has two really interesting ideas. The rest aren’t bad, they’re just obvious or common. But check out numbers three and four:
3. By “revamping the liveblog template” and turning it into a “second screen”
Heron recognises she is “lucky to count on about a dozen interactive developers as colleagues” on her team, “which is kind of a dream come true for a journalism nerd like me”.
She told the news:rewired conference that the “team of developer-journalists has rebuilt our traditional liveblog and transformed it into more of a second screen, social media-heavy experience – a one-stop-shop for reporting, analysis, newsworthy tweets, reader engagement, and interactive election results”.
4. By creating a “liveblog about liveblogs”
The New York Times team decided it should provide its “own coverage and analysis” for the “aforementioned media cacophony”.
Media reporters Brian Stelter and David Carr have been using Storify to collect the “news media’s tweets, videos and Facebook posts on primary nights”. They have been adding their own analysis as narrative within the Storify.
The future of location-based marketing is cool. . . or scary. Yes it is. You knew that, but read that piece and see if your position changes.
Did the AP just declare war on news aggregators?
(T)his disruption has been even worse for AP and its ilk because they are primarily distributors, and the web has fundamentally democratized content distribution. Instead of trying to find ways to adapt to this new reality, however, the AP seems determined to fight it with everything it has, including lawsuits: On Tuesday, the service launched a lawsuit in New York against a digital news-aggregation service called Meltwater, accusing the service of copyright infringement and “free riding” on its content. The AP says it isn’t going after news aggregators as a whole, but this is clearly meant as a show of force.
The AP may try to charge me for linking to their release. (If they do, let’s all laugh at them together.)
Finally, one of the best Valentine’s tales you’ll read today. It is told through Twitter, making it unique in a way, but it has great pictures and a lovely story, making it traditional. The best work always stems from great stories.
