I haven't seen an online ad in four years.

Thanks to the magic of Firefox and a little beaut of an extension called Adblock, I haven't seen an ad online since I've been in college. No annoying Java overlays, no pop-ups or pop-unders, not a single interstitial screen (though occasionally I'll have to click through a blank one), not even text links delivered by Google. Do online ad rates account for this? Who's getting fleeced?

This might be one advantage broadcast news outlets have over those online; I can access and explore news site online at length without even seeing an advertisement, let alone clicking on one. Sure, TV viewers could record the news on their VCR or DVR and fast forward through the commercials, but they're much less likely to do so with time sensitive, live broadcasts like the news than they are an episode of their favorite sitcom. Why not just wait until the paper comes in the morning, otherwise?

Even newspapers can compel their readers to look at ads. People may have learned to glaze over them but they're still there. Readers can't get a version of the paper delivered to their door with all the ads cut out, which is basically what I'm getting online.

There's an idea, though. What if newspaper subscribers could pay a premium rate and get all a newspaper's content, sans ads, delivered every day? My parents would probably spring for that.

Twitter Dee and Twitter Dum

Twitter's new election center is a great feature. It provides a simple cross section of people's current thoughts on the political hot topics of the day, and even alerted me to a piece by my favorite movie critic that I somehow hadn't found first (Ebert, obviously).

Being able to sample public opinion so immediately and broadly should certainly come in handy for someone. No, Twitter users don't represent the entire country, but now I can quickly see which recent news stories are gaining traction and becoming water cooler fodder. This is a totally unsourced statement, but I suspect people plugged in to Twitter or social bookmarking sites like Digg are often the tastemakers and agenda setters amongst their friends. I've no doubt that they're the first to break stories to peers by IMing them with a link or posting it on their Facebook wall.

There are a few useful applications accessible through Twitter, like Timer (I can tweet something and have it texted to my phone as a reminder later) and Remember The Milk, but I'd be happy to find more.

Story Recommendation Engines

I just noticed the (great) new Miami Herald Web site has a story recommendation feature. Users can vote up articles and push them up to the top of a little box featured prominently on the frontpage. Currently, Carl Hiaasen's indictment of Sarah Palin is claiming the top spot, with more than triple the votes of the second place story.

That is the issue with gadgets like this: stories that espouse opinions or take sides on an issue will inevitably be more popular than straight news articles. Even if a terribly important event happens, it will likely be overshadowed here by something like Heather Locklear "spinning out of control" (currently number five on the list, with six votes). After all, nobody's going to recommend a story about the economy skydiving or a catastrophic natural disaster because it would feel like endorsing that event or something.

I'd be interested to see what percentage of users have ever hit that recommendation button. I've ticked it a few times on the Chicago Sun-Times' site, but even their most popular columnists only get up to like ten ticks.

Wagering on the Election

Intrade's election trading has been getting a fair amount of play around the Web. The site is sort of a free market for the future; users buy contracts depending on what they believe will happen. The prices adjust accordingly depending on how popular any given outcome is. Currently, traders are favoring Obama, and that's real money they're betting with.

It looks like people expect Florida to go blue, though only barely. I'm surprised how confident people are that Colorado and New Mexico will favor Obama, let alone Nevada. Really, though, who are the four percent of people giving Illinois to McCain?

Also, I'm happy to see Blogger is letting me embed this map in my post (that thing's interactive! Click on!), because it wouldn't let me do something similar last week.

Addendum: Drudge v. Huffington II

This is the first time I've seen this: The Huffington Post updated a (semi-)breaking news story about David Letterman with a report from The Drudge Report. Check it out here, excerpted below:

Update: Drudge reports that Letterman mocked McCain during the show's taping Wednesday afternoon.

"In the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, "Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?"

Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, "You don't suspend your campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves." And he joked: "I think someone's putting something in his metamucil."

"He can't run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sarah Palin. Where is she?"

"What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

The comments will air Wednesday evening.

Original Post: John McCain canceled a scheduled appearance on CBS's "Late Show with David Letterman" mere hours before he was slated to tape the show Wednesday as part of the suspension of his campaign, MSNBC reported on air Wednesday afternoon. Keith Olbermann will appear on Wednesday's "Late Show" in McCain's place.

Olbermann appeared on Letterman's show in April, when the "Countdown" host said that most people in news are not smart enough for analysis and Letterman joked about Olbermann's size.

This is just an interesting postscript to my comparison of the other breaking news story. On The Post, the story got fairly prominent placement on the frontpage with a fairly tame headline, while Drudge currently has it on the top of the page in BRIGHT RED BREAKING NEWS FONT. Neither seems to imply that the site has any opinion of the story, which may have been arguable with Drudge's past entertainment headlines.

Drudge v. Huffington II: Breaking News

The last few entries have detailed the coverage The Huffington Post dedicated to a plane crash which killed four and injured two famous musicians. As part of the ongoing comparison between The Post and The Drudge Report, I will now detail Drudge's coverage of the accident.

Perhaps predictably, The Drudge Report has no means with which to search its site or access past publications. Here, again, its design is prohibitive to accessing information. It does, though, link to another third-party site which offers an archive of Drudge's frontpage. Still, this site makes clear that Drudge Report owner Matt Drudge is not associated with the site in any way.

Point is, The Drudge Report made no mention of the plane crash. It does cover other entertainment news, though the conspiracy theorists among us may posit that they only do so when it serves political interests; the frontpage currently has headlines proclaiming "Lowest-rated EMMYS ever," "Political digs slipped in," and "Tina Fey on Palin: 'I want to be done playing this lady Nov. 5.'" One could theorize that these stories are included only because they reflect poorly on the Emmys and Hollywood, which, obviously, is famously liberal. Another section concerns senatorial candidate Al Franken's involvement with a sketch on Saturday Night Live that, the headline says, "suggests Sarah [Palin]'s husband guilty of incest."

Examining breaking news on The Huffington Post, part IV

Come Sunday, The Huffington Post did update its coverage of the plane crash that killed four and critically injured musicians DJ AM and Travis Barker. As seen here, it added a brief AP story about the medical condition of the flight's celebrity passengers. I will again refrain from excerpting the AP story for the sake of my wallet, but it is again interesting to consider what The Post opted not to cover. It would appear that with the survivors looking like they will eventually recover, the story has fallen in importance. In fact, it is no longer on The Post's frontpage.

Elsewhere, especially on entertainment sites, the coverage continues. MTV News compiled a number of news reports concerning the supposed cause of the crash, blown tires. Additionally, they have a story on even more famous well-wishers, including Mandy Moore and Jermaine Dupri.

The course of The Post's coverage is not entirely surprising. Because it is an entirely online outlet, and not one that generates much original content, it concerns itself with this story as it is breaking. Once the facts are established and the outcome is somewhat assumed, it leaves the story for more traditional media companies to detail. Considering how little effort it took for me to find information its coverage ommitted, it is somewhat unusual to see that not even a cursory attempt was made to link to these sites, especially considering how much real estate celebrity figures receive on their site.

Examining breaking news on The Huffington Post, part III

After linking to three Us Magazine stories about the plane crash which involved musicians DJ AM and Travis Barker, The Huffington Post linked to a story from People Magazine about Travis Barker's ex-wife. What is particularly interesting about The Post doing so is how they determined which entertainment-oriented stories on the accident were of interest or importance. Finding stories similar to the ones linked was not difficult, but after the link to People Magazine's site, The Post stopped updating until Sunday.

Here, for example, are a few stories which The Post could have, but did not link to:

• MTV News included an eyewitness account of the plane becoming a fireball in addition to other information The Post's page is lacking
  
• TMZ reported that Barker was burned from the waist down and DJ AM suffered facial burns
• MTV News detailed the number of musicians who extended their sympathies to the crash's victims
• E! Online updated a number of times, with stories on the plane itself, the wife of one of those killed in the crash, and the reactions of many other celebrities.
  

Examining breaking news on The Huffington Post, part II

Following their publication of the Associated Press' story on the plane crash that killed four and injured musicians Travis Barker and DJ AM, The Huffington Post began to collect stories which approached the story from an entertainment perspective. While it is primarily a source for straight news, The Post also maintains sections for media and entertainment news and hosts the (politically-oriented) blogs of famous entertainers like A. Brooks and Alec Baldwin.

It first posted a number of stories that originated with Us Magazine, excerpting a statement from one:

Both Travis Barker and Adam Goldstein (DJ AM) are in critical but stable condition and are being treated at Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta, Georgia after surviving a plane crash late last night in Columbia, South Carolina. The hospital will issue a statement with an update on their condition at 9 a.m. eastern time tomorrow.

Due to the nature of the injuries and the evolving course of treatment, no further information on their condition is available at this time.

The accident claimed the lives of four people on board, two of whom, Chris Baker (Lil Chris) and Charles Stills (Che), were close friends of the injured.

On behalf of Travis Barker and DJ AM, deepest sympathy is expressed to the loved ones of all who perished in the crash. As the two recuperate and mourn this loss, privacy for them, their families, and friends is requested at this time. (source)

Following that, The Post linked to a story about DJ AM's ex-girlfriend, Nicole Richie, and her reaction to the accident. When Us Magazine posted a story saying AM phoned his mother from the ambulance, The Post linked to that as well. You can see all of this on The Post's Web site here.

Examining breaking news on The Huffington Post, part I

Because The Huffington Post is more of a news aggregator than a news generator, they don't update breaking news stories like many other sites might. They exhibit a fondness for what they call "BigNews Pages," where they find and compile every source and opinion on any given topic. For a breaking story that might not warrant a BigNews Page of its own, they opt to keep updates coming within the story itself.

For example, on Sept. 20, a plane crash killed four and critically injured two well-known musicians. The Post, unable to cover the crash itself, ran the Associated Press story originally. When the AP account was updated a few hours later, they replaced their version with the more recent one.

I cannot link to the original AP story since The Post has revised it, and I will not excerpt it here because the AP expects bloggers to pay them for excerpting as few as five words. Still available, though, is the final AP story from Sept. 20, at the bottom of this page.

UPDATE: I believe the earliest AP story is still available here on Billboard Magazine's Web site.

FiveThirtyEight

My math-loving friend assures me that the methodology employed by this site is about as good as it gets. I could not begin to explain everything they take into account, but, briefly, they apply their own statistical model to the results of every presidential poll there is – and do so in an intelligent way, he tells me. This includes weighing polls based on how accurate they've been in the past, accounting for historical trends, and applying some sort of magic math line of regression. I'm not a math major.

Point is, as it stands now, Obama looks to have a significant advantage. The scenario analysis section on the right is quite interesting; there's an 18 percent chance of an Obama landslide victory, and a 40 percent chance of Obama winning the election despite losing Ohio.

Here's an example of how the Internet enables people who would otherwise be uninvolved – in this case, a math wiz – to play a role in the news business. This site predicted many of the Obama/Clinton contests more accurately than any single poll.

Drudge v. Huffington I

In comparing The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, two things are immediately apparent. Drudge, historically, tends to be a bit more conservative-friendly, while The Post appears to lean to the left. More interesting, perhaps, is the design of each site. Famously simple, Drudge does not even offer an RSS feed. There are some made available by third parties, easily found through Googling, but such a feature is standard on every other news site on the planet.

The Post, on the other hand, utilizes Web 2.0 tech to an almost overwhelming level. It has article-specific comment forums, in-page Digg rankings and goes so far as to have the frontpage automatically refresh the amount of comments on every story.

While Drudge has been around longer, it will be interesting to see if its archaic layout finally handicaps its ability to attract an audience. The Alexa rankings for each site are an interesting comparison:

Joy Giovanni and Journalism

The Internet allows for journalists to better broadcast information, convey messages through new media, and access sources and data with significantly less effort. Hopefully that ease of access won't foster laziness, though, because the Internet also subjects each and every story to an unheard level of scrutiny and oversight from the public. The broad reach of the Internet enables experts in the most obscure fields to tear into even innocuous mistakes, theoretically making the discourse more accurate and therefore more beneficial to society.

My favorite example of this was uncovered by this blog, the purpose of which I'm totally unclear on. Back in 2005, a commenter there pointed out that the following photo is not of an unidentified kidnap victim being liberated from the trunk of a car, as the caption claimed, but instead shows (now former) professional wrestler Joy Giovanni.



Three years later, the same photo (a direct lift from an actual televised storyline in the WWE. YouTube here.) is still associated with the AP story (as seen here on MSNBC.com). That's comical.

Thankfully, in this case, technology hasn't outrun ethics. Though less-than-ethical photographers may manipulate their images to intensify the drama within, the Internet has more than enough Photoshop experts to identify and vilify those that do so. There are countless other issues with the "democratization" of journalism as it moves online (more on that to come, I'm sure), but here the art benefits from readers keeping practitioners on the straight and narrow. Would such a hardcore WWE fan have come across that image had it only appeared in newsprint? Doubtful.

CNJ442: Embarking on an online journalism adventure!

As of this instant (this post is, in fact, an in-class assignment), this blog is now subject to grading. Thus far I have been using it almost exclusively to archive things I've had published, but as part of Suzanne Levinson's online journalism course I will now be blogging almost daily on, well, online journalism. Suzanne Levinson is the director of site operations for the Miami Herald's website. Because I spent some slow time during my internship at The Lutheran registering and setting up this blog I have a bit of a head start, and I think having some motivation to blog regularly will be positive. I also intend to set up a blogroll so as to keep up with my peers and classmates, which I've probably been in need of.

As for the course, I'm encouraged. During an editorial meeting for The Miami Hurricane (new site! Check it out.) last week it was made abundantly clear by a guest speaker that web producing skills are a must, so the class should be a great opportunity to get some experience in multimedia and the like.

Thoughts: The title of this post is terrible. The monitors in this Mac lab are absolutely glorious, though. Also, it's remarkable that four years in, I am somehow in a journalism class in which I know no one.

Saint now, pastor later

During the spring semester of Charlie Ruud’s first year at Luther Seminary, he decided to attend the open tryout for the St. Paul [Minn.] Saints, a team in the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball. He threw well, but the team didn’t need a pitcher.

Weeks later, Ruud’s mind was elsewhere—on Aug. 6 he would be marrying his fiancee, Becky, whom he met at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn.—when the Saints asked if he could make an emergency start in the second game of a doubleheader. However, it was during his honeymoon. Ruud declined, knowing it could have been his only opportunity to play professional baseball.

Read the full story at TheLutheran.org

A subscription to The Lutheran is required to access the full article.