September 10, 2008

How much multimedia is on your site?

Video, sound and images...how do you use those to draw your readers in? How do you use multimedia to disseminate information? Take a look at this video. It takes typically boring data from a study and presents it to the community in an attention-grabbing way easily understandable way.

September 9, 2008

Reverse revenue model

Lucas Grindley, online managing editor for NationalJournal.com takes "thinking outside the box" to a new level with his nontraditional approach to employment ads. His idea? Don't charge for the recruitment ad...charge for the replies. It's called lead generation. Bad idea or brilliant idea? You tell us.

September 5, 2008

Improve your online photo gallery

Thank you, Mindy McAdams for pointing out what many photo galleries on news sites are lacking and what can be done to raise the bar. She says: "A great gallery player is The Week in Pictures from MSNBC.com. It’s fast. It’s easy and pleasant to use. It’s way better than good enough." I suggest you check it out.

September 4, 2008

Give good photos their due

This post courtesy of Steve Yelvington:

Codrie, La., after Hurricane Gustav

It's "just" a 360-degree picture, something that's been around on a lot of news sites since the early days of iPix and Quicktime VR.

But it's huge.

And I tell you what, on a 20-inch Apple Cinema monitor, you feel like you're going to get dunked. The detail is just dazzling. Click and spin and look around.

It makes me painfully aware of how badly most news sites treat photography: Little tiny thumbnail images that (if we're lucky) click through to semi-tiny versions.

It's as if we're still catering to the 14.4kbps dialup crowd.

In a broadband, high-definition world, we should be giving images their due.

September 2, 2008

New Statesman investigates...

The UK’s New Statesman asked its readers to vote on the subject for the periodical’s next investigation. It's been called "an experiment with merit". Do you think this is a good way to get readers involved in the journalism process? Would this fly in Arizona?