Publish Your Multimedia Stories In Time Out Chicago

Regional magazines sometimes feel like an exclusive club that you can’t get into unless you’re a local. But for the Chicago edition of Time Out, writers from beyond the Windy City are welcome to send in their stories, including music and concert reviews for its TOC website.

At over 3 million page views a month, the site isn’t a bad place for a beginner or a journalist passionate about his or her craft — not the money. And photo galleries are also a big deal on TimeOutChicago.com, so editor-in-chief Frank Sennett encourages budding photographers to look to the website to build up some credits.

Get editor contacts and advice on pitching features in How To Pitch: Time Out Chicago.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

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Adobe’s Updated Digital Publishing Suite Means More Magazines For The iPhone

When it comes to digital magazines, why should tablet owners have all the fun? That’s the sentiment Adobe was espousing earlier today at an event held in New York where they officially pulled back the curtains on their updated Digital Publishing Suite.

You’d be forgiven if you haven’t stumbled across Adobe’s DPS before — as the name sort of implies, it’s meant for publishers to prepare digital editions of their print content for consumption on all sorts of gadgetry. Given their size, tablets have been the obvious focus for content creators, but Adobe’s new update brings (among other things) the ability for them to whip up digital magazines that work well on the iPhone too.

One publisher has already signaled their commitment to tailoring their digital magazine experience to the iPhone — Conde Nast leans pretty heavily on Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite to layout their digital editions, and they revealed that an iPhone-friendly makeover for The New Yorker was in the works. Here’s hoping that some of Conde Nast’s other properties (my fingers are crossed for the exceptionally handsome Wired) get the same treatment, though the shift toward smaller screens will force designers to rethink how users read and engage with that content.

Even with the process for creating rich media content for smaller screens streamlined (Adobe offers up their own best practices here), it’s still no easy feat to devise a handsome, thoughtful way to dive into that content on a smaller screen. That lack of real estate means that publishers will have to get really creative in order to deliver the sort of experience that make digital magazines more compelling than their dead-plant counterparts.

[via Gizmodo]

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Google Currents - a system for publishers, not journalists

I always like to play around with new toys, and so as soon as the Google Currents production system was released to the public, I set about making an edition for myself.

I found the tool delightfully easy to use, but also that the product is very much set up for publishers rather than journalists.

To add the main contents of this blog I simply defined one section as “currybetdotnet” and pointed it at the RSS feed for this website.

I then added an @currybet social media stream of my tweets.

So far, so good.

What I wanted to then do was to add in the content that I write for the Guardian.

In theory it should be easy - set up a section in my Google Currents edition called “on guardian.co.uk”, and point Google’s service at the RSS feed of my contributor page.

However, I can’t verify that feed in Google Currents, so the content languishes in the CMS as “pending”, and doesn’t form part of the published edition. I can’t prove to Google’s machines that I wrote the content, and so it belongs in an aggregation I’ve put together, because I can’t prove my association with the domain name the content was published under.

I can see why this is there - obviously as a publisher you’d probably prefer that people weren’t making custom mix’n’match Google Current editions featuring your content. But it is a system that favours the traditional gatekeeper model of publishing, rather than recognises that individuals can publish in various titles, and that an aggregated edition of their writing might be desirable for the consumer. In effect, Google is acting as the gatekeeper for...

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GM Halting Facebook Ads: Did The Auto Maker Just “Not Get Social”?

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook, says The Wall Street Journal according to “people familiar with the matter.” But I spoke to a source close to Facebook that characterize GM’s efforts as “taking one swing and deciding to quit.” My source says GM’s efforts weren’t social enough, focusing on building apps rather than launching social ad campaigns that spread by word-of-mouth.

So what went wrong, and does Facebook need to offer more flexibility to advertisers?

Facebook was reportedly unable to convince GM that its ads are an effective way to reach consumers. GM Marketing Chief Joel Ewanick reportedly told the Journal that the company “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.”

The auto maker supposedly spends a total of $40 million on Facebook, including $10 million on advertising, so the GM pullout won’t have a significant effect on Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenue. However, it’s certainly awkward to have this news break just a few days before Facebook’s IPO. (And the timing probably isn’t a coincidence.)

I’m guessing GM doesn’t see things that way, but it’s worth noting that Facebook has highlighted successful auto campaigns in the past. For example, there was a Kia campaign that led to a 13-percent increase in awareness for the Kia Soul, as well as a Mazda check-in deal in the United Kingdom that led to a 34 percent increase in sales of Mazda MX-5 during one of the campaign months. Isolated anecdotes? Sure, but at least they show that Facebook isn’t totally inhospitable to car companies.

If we take my source at their word, the GM news may also point to the fact that even if Facebook can work for large advertisers, there are challenges in bringing those advertisers on-board. Facebook executives themselves have said they’re moving away from traditional advertising to a new model, with ads that are built around stories. It’s a compelling idea, but for some traditional advertisers, it may be more appealing to just show a big, glossy ad — like

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Easel.ly Launches Browser Tool And Templates For Quick, Easy, Beautiful Infographics

Did you know that infographics are 30 to 40 times more likely to be viewed and shared vs. text? At least that’s the claim that Easel.ly makes on its homepage. The new site, a project in beta, makes it super easy to use drag-n-drop templates to create beautiful infographics for free.  A demo video is embedded below:

For newsrooms, this site poses huge opportunity in terms of shareability of information across social media. Newspapers are the worst offenders when it comes to forgetting about graphics that make sense for the web. They’ll often repurpose something that ran in print, and often that graphic isn’t compelling enough to share on social networks — a space where visuals are constantly competing for users’ attention. But easel.ly is so easy to use that resources don’t have to pulled away from graphic designers; it’s a site that social media editors can use.

continued…

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Pew Study: 18% Of U.S. Smartphone Owners Use Check-In Apps

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the popularity of check-in apps continues to grow, though it still isn’t quite mainstream yet. Pew’s latest survey found that in February 2012, 18% of U.S. smartphone owners over 18 used geosocial check-in apps like Foursquare. That’s up from 12% in May 2011. Even among adults who said they own a feature phone, 11% said they use check-in apps. This means that 10% of U.S. adults (including those who don’t own a cell phone), have now used check-in services at some point in the past.

Sadly, the Pew survey did not ask users about how frequently they use these services. Given the hype around these apps in the past, it would be interesting to see how sticky these apps really are. It’s worth noting that the Pew survey’s question specifically mentions Foursquare (and Gowalla in the March 2011 survey), but doesn’t mention Facebook or other services that allow users to share their location in some form or another. I can’t help but wonder if the number wouldn’t be a bit higher if the question had focused less on Foursquare.

Besides looking at geosocial and check-in services, the Pew study also looked at how often U.S. smartphone owners use their phones to get directions or to get general location-based information like restaurant recommendations. There, the numbers are obviously much higher than those for check-in apps. Almost three-quarters of U.S smartphone owners, says the Pew report, now access location-based information from their phones. In a way, it’s actually more surprising that almost 25% of smartphone owners don’t use their phones to get location-based information.

Another recent Pew survey, by the way, found that 65% of smartphone owners have used their phones to get turn-by-turn driving directions and 15% do so on a typical day.

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The Importance Of Social Media In Elections: Mostly Hot Air

If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have a realistic shot at being the Republican nominee and Barack Obama would be on track to crush Mitt Romney in the biggest landslide in American history.

Despite the hype over follower counts, a new study shows that there’s no credible evidence that Twitter can be used to predict how elections will turn out. “It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated,” writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello, in an unusually strident rant (for an academic). Gayo’s conclusions are intuitive: social media users are an unrepresentative slice of voters, and tweets may not accurately reflect how voters behave.

And, his principles apply not to just Twitter, but to all social media. In reality, much of a candidate’s social media “fans” are a composition of individuals who are not swayed by campaigns: reliable supporters, opposition spectators, and the growing army of non-voting 20-somethings.

Let’s look at the numbers: Paul has five times more Facebook fans than Rick Santorum (950K vs. 189K) and about 50% of the current front runner, Mitt Romney (1.67M). Yet, Santorum narrowly lost to Romney, and Paul lost by a landslide to both. In other words, the number of social media followers has little correlation with electoral wins.

Aware that raw follower count is an empty campaign asset, social scientists have attempted to analyze whether social media “sentiment,” or tone of the discussion, can reveal how much a candidate is liked, and therefore which candidate would win an election. According to arguably the top social media analytics firm in the industry, Crimson Hexagon, Paul outperformed all of his conservative counterparts as measured by total volume of Twitter mentions. Twitter chatter around Paul was of 26% of the total political conversation in the run up to the New Hampshire primary, while, Mitt Romney, the actual winner, had 22%. Paul, too, had a slight popularity advantage, with relatively more positive comments about him then his duller opponent (12% positive and 14% negative for Paul vs. 9% positive vs. 13% negative for Romney)

Why is social media such a false temptress for campaigns? First, Twitter is largely a shouting match ...

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Local newspapers' crisis: how managements have tried to cope

Today's extract from What do we mean by local?* is taken from a chapter by Agnes Gulyas, a media lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church university.

In company with most analysts, she sees the crisis of local newspapers as a revenue problem rather than a readership problem.

Publishers have responded to the demise of their traditional business model in different ways, she writes. But she discovered, in a series of interviews with managing directors, that there are at least four "common elements".

They involve changes in operations, organisational culture, product portfolio and financial models. She explains them one by one, beginning with changes in operations...

Faced with significant decline in advertising revenues, most companies introduced cost-cutting strategies, including staff redundancies and restructuring.

It is estimated that the local newspaper sector has lost around one in five of its estimated 12,000 journalists since the mid-2000s.

Companies with more than one title often introduced centralised production facilities to cut costs and maximise advertising revenues.

Managers thought that with centralised hubs their organisations could deliver efficiencies, have greater flexibility in portfolio delivery, share relevant content more easily across different products and introduce uniform standards.

Strategies have also included modifications of job specifications of existing staff, new skills requirements and changes in working practices.

Historically, many local titles have been weekly publications with corresponding production cycles, which had to change dramatically with online activities to a 24/7 production culture.

Restructuring has also involved outsourcing and changing operational practices of non-core business activities in response to changing value chains.

Many companies now do not have printing facilities, instead they outsource printing. Another common response has been changing distribution patterns. Distribution of local newspapers is expensive due to the fragmented nature of distribution outlets.

As a response to the external challenges, many loc...

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 Instacanvas Launches Global Marketplace For Instagram Prints

Given that it’s pretty hard to take a really bad photo with Instagram, it’s only natural that some users would want to turn their images into physical objects to hang on their walls. There are a few companies out there that allow you to print your Instagram photos on canvas, but Instacanvas is probably the first site that focuses on letting Instagram users sell their own images on canvas to other users. The LA-based graduate of MuckerLab‘s startup accelerator launched its beta just eight weeks ago and is officially coming out of beta today.

The site already features over 30,000 galleries and currently sees about 1.1 million unique monthly visitors.

As Instacanvas’s CEO and co-founder Matt Munson told me yesterday, the instant success of the site took the four-person team by surprise. When it first opened up its doors after the team invited a handful of Instagram users to try it, the site quickly went viral and Instacanvas signed up over 4,000 users in its first 72 hours.

Artists can set up their own galleries on the site within minutes, though because of the current demand, there is currently a waiting list (users can skip ahead of the line by having their friends request their galleries, though). Prints start at $39.95 for 12″ x 12″ frames and go up to $79.99 for 20″ x 20″ canvases. Instacanvas pays out 20% of the sale price of each item sold.

The company will ship internationally (though international shipping, of course, is costly). It’s also currently testing printers in Europe and Asia to make things easier and cheaper for its international customers. As Munson stressed, though, the actual image treatment in done in-house – only the printing itself is outsourced.

You can, of course, also have Instacanvas print your own pictures and there’s no waiting list for that (those prints start at $31).

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Foursquare Gets Its Own Searchable Timeline With New History Page

Foursquare has tweaked its history page this morning, in order to give users a more functional, searchable version of their past check-ins. Although you could see your old check-ins before, they weren’t as accessible as they are now. The new page lets you click on a drop-down box to head back into the previous months or years (somewhat reminiscent of Facebook Timeline functionality), while sidebar boxes lets you search and filter your check-ins by location, category or who you were with at the time.

Being able to pull up search through your check-in history makes for a more compelling use case as for why you should bother checking in somewhere – especially if there’s no badge, mayorship or special to be gained by doing so. (The latter of which is proving often, sadly, to still be the case). Because now, you can remember where you went last night, after getting too drunk and blacking out.

No? Not a good example?

OK, more seriously, maybe you’d rather pull up all your favorite restaurants, so you can add them to your Foursquare lists of top local hotspots. In fact, Foursquare says that’s one of the use cases it actually has in mind – and the company says that soon, it will be further enhancing this page so you can filter by venue, add tips and create lists directly from this page.

Foursquare has been busy adding a number of ways to make its local discovery features more relevant to users who may have tired of the check-in game. For example, earlier this week, it rolled out a feature that lets you click a link on a Foursquare check-in posted on Facebook to add the venue to your to-do list. It also partnered with OpenTable (encroaching on ReserveMyCity‘s territory), so users can make reservations at over 15,000 restaurants across the U.S. Again, this was something added to the desktop website, where Foursquare’s newest features often hit first. Mobile-only users, stay tuned.

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