In (Voice Of San Diego) CEO Scott Lewis’s announcement blog post, he buried the coolest part at the bottom: The news site has migrated from a proprietary system over to WordPress. To me this is the best part of the announcement because it’s the very thing empowering all the other cool features they’re launching. The reason for the switch — though painful, as any major CMS overhaul is — was that they simply needed to be able to hire more people and innovate more quickly…

It always baffles me when news organizations spend millions of dollars on content management systems when that money can better be spent on hiring developers to build out custom tools and solutions on top of free, existing, modern, well-documented, well-supported, frequently-updated, universally-known open source software.

Read the full piece at 10,000 Words

As noted in a recent RackSpace review:

“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here; it depends on your goals, technical expertise, budget and what you need your site to do. For a simple blog or brochure-type site, WordPress could be the best choice (while very friendly for non-developers, it’s a flexible platform also capable of very complex sites). For a complex, highly customized site requiring scalability and complex content organization, Drupal might be the best choice. For something in between that has an easier learning curve, Joomla may be the answer.”

These days, I rarely find a project for which I need to go beyond highly customizing a WordPress theme and linking in external media services. I can’t even remember the last time I fired up Dreamweaver. /kjn

There’s been a bit of a backlash brewing in media circles lately: a growing movement against the idea that online journalism has to consist solely of hundreds of tiny news briefs or slideshows, and in favor of the idea that “longform” writing can also thrive online. Along those lines, the technology site Fast Company provided some interesting data recently about its experience with writing longer pieces — but I think the conclusions it arrived at aren’t about length as much as they are about engagement….

In his post, entitled “This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories,” FastCo Labs editor Chris Dannen talked about how the site decided to experiment with what he calls “slow live-blogging” — that is, a series of stories that would take shape over time, beginning with a short stub article consisting mostly of a topic paragraph or summary of an issue, and then get added to as new developments arose. Dannen explained that this was a way of blending news with a more feature-like approach.

Read the full piece at paidContent

(Planet Money contributing editor Alex) Blumberg believes that audio has an advantage over print when it comes to these projects. “I think when people hear your voice, they form a connection to you that they don’t necessarily form when they’re reading a story,” he said. “Listening to something on your smartphone is more intimate than reading it… We’re excited about this project and that excitement is infectious and people want to be part of it.”

Read the full piece at 10,000 Words

The way the media works — digital or otherwise — hasn’t changed all that much in some respects: journalists interview people about a topic and then select the quotes they want to use. Sometimes a reporter will cherry-pick an interview in a way that the source doesn’t like, but what can they do about it? As it turns out, they can do quite a bit about it now, thanks to the democratization of publishing. And I think how media outlets choose to respond to this phenomenon says a lot about their commitment to “open journalism” or transparency…

A recent blog post from startup founder Chad Whitacre re-awakened this debate: in a post on Medium, the publishing platform started by former Twitter CEO Evan Williams, the founder of Gittip described how he responded to an interview request from TechCrunch about his company, which is building an online gift exchange. When Whitacre suggested that the reporter do an “open interview” via Google Hangouts that would be posted on YouTube, the TechCrunch writer declined.

Me: If you’re not comfortable with streaming/posting the call, I will totally understand. In the future I’ll be sure to let journalists know up front about my open call policy. :-) Let me know one way or another…

TC: Yeh, good luck with that.

Read the full piece at PaidContent

Twitter, fast becoming the basic source, tool, and distribution point in news, is looking for someone to run its news operation:

“You will be responsible for devising and executing the strategies that make Twitter indispensable to newsrooms and journalists, as well as an essential part of the operations and strategy of news organizations and TV news networks. You should have a strong vision for the broad potential of Twitter and news, while also being able to rigorously manage and scale the news team’s daily impact.”

…(Experience: Minimum of 15 years in news in editorial or journalism, 10 years of managing teams and at least 5 years executing strategic partnerships)

Read the full piece at guardian.co.uk
See job posting at Twitter

Ubiquitous comment system Disqus has made the discovery of trending topics visual with its new website, Gravity. The dynamic, HTML5-based website reports in real time where articles are receiving comment traffic by tracking motion across all of Disqus’s publication partners.

“What you’re seeing isn’t a simple directory of content people are clicking on,” the company writes in Gravity’s about page. “You’re seeing discussions experiencing a spike in volume. You’re seeing what people are talking about.”

Bubbles based around different topics — including Tech, Lifestyle and News — pop in and out of the space depending on their growing popularity among commenters. You can click the story to see where it comes from, as well as read highlighted comments from the particular story.

Read the full piece at 10,000 Words

(Troy) Thibodeaux will lead a team of programmer-journalists to create groundbreaking journalism with a focus on newsroom tools, data-driven stories and interactive features. There will be a strong emphasis on working on global investigative stories, in alliance with news leaders and journalists across the company.

Read the full piece at Poynter.

Early next year, an emerging wireless technology known as LTE Broadcast could (make) it possible for carriers to put a TV-like broadcast stream within LTE cellular signals… Putting data in broadcast mode reduces congestion but makes the most sense in situations where everyone is watching the same newscast, sports match, or other special piece of content at the same time. In such situations, using LTE Broadcast mode, a carriers’ transmitter needs to just send a signal out over one channel rather than separate ones for each mobile device. That’s how the traditional TV broadcast works: it doesn’t matter if 100 or a million people are watching, because the content is out there for the taking.

Read the full piece at MIT Technology Review

Reuters unveiled a preview site for the future look and design of Reuters.com; it had given a sneak peek earlier. It’s a river-of-news type of approach that mirrors the flow of data on one of Reuters terminals, but has also become increasingly popular in the era of social media. Go to an article page and you find that you’re actually placed in the middle of a larger stream of content — scroll up or down and you’ll find your story’s text actually lives in a bifurcated version of the Reuters front page. If every page is your homepage, why not treat them all like one?

Read the full piece at Nieman Journalism Lab

Some people have had it with TV. They’ve had enough of the 100-plus channel universe. They don’t like timing their lives around network show schedules. They’re tired of $100-plus monthly bills.

A growing number of them have stopped paying for cable and satellite TV service, and don’t even use an antenna to get free signals over the air. These people are watching shows and movies on the Internet, sometimes via cellphone connections. Last month, the Nielsen Co. started labeling people in this group “Zero TV” households, because they fall outside the traditional definition of a TV home. There are 5 million of these residences in the U.S., up from 2 million in 2007.