yelvington.com

Cincinnati.Com’s CincyNavigator launched last September - and is already increasing engagement for the site. Forbes.com notes that the data/map mashup site (along the lines of EveryBlock, etc.) spawned 570,000 pageviews in its first six months, and increased the average user session from three minutes to five minutes. It took nearly a year to put the site together - but it was well worth the work, with a simple interface and great data navigation.

The Associated Press hit the street with its latest venture: AP Mobile News Network. The site - easily accessible from a smartphone at APNews.com - features a slick iPhone interface with news, sports, entertainment, photos and even video.

But remember when the AP rolled out “The Wire” - the national news site that’s largely been eliminated now? You got a cool map of the country, and every market you clicked on gave you a newspaper choice. Ditto this product. When I customized several cities - all I could find were newspaper content providers. E&P reports that 100 news orginizations are on board - but Forbes says “100 papers” are part of the service - leading me to believe no TV or radio outlets are in the mix. Beyond the provider list is something even more basic: The default thumbnail for a story with no photo… is the image of a newspaper.

The Associated Press is trying to get itself a prized piece of square-ish real estate on the home screen of the Apple iPhone, Forbes reports. The news collective notes that the phone has buttons for weather, stocks and maps - but not news. It says the AP Mobile News Network is a prime candidate to be that news button. But why APMNN instead of Google News, et al?

[T]he business model behind the effort is very different from those of online news aggregators, too. Instead of page views, participants will get half the revenues for any ads they sell, and half the revenues generated by any content they contribute.

A rant about the APMNN in a moment — but it’s interesting that the collective is working on a new model that would pool monetary gain for the journalistic resources contributed.

And the business model behind the effort is very different from those of online news aggregators, too. Instead of page views, participants will get half the revenues for any ads they sell, and half the revenues generated by any content they contribute.

Some enterprising YouTuber/Digger was looking at the video of the WNYW/Fox 5 intro.. when he noticed something. Of course, now the Fox is bad floodgates are (as usual) open on both YouTube and Digg.

The massive combo of the Wall Street Journal, WWOR, WNYW, New York Post and Newsday won’t come to pass. News Corp. was bidding in the $580 million range - but the New York Times reports that it backed off, and a $650 million bid from Cablevision was likely to take the prize.

Newsday
It could be announced as early as Monday. "Cablevision appears to have won" with its $650 million bid, says one source. Another says it's unclear whether New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, who bid $580 million, is still interested in Newsday.

Newsday
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp says it's unable to justify outbidding Cablevision's $650 million offer from an economic perspective. "News Corp's decision to walk away from Newsday is an unexpected twist in the three-way bidding war for the paper," says Reuters. Mort Zuckerman submitted a $580 million bid for the Tribune-owned paper in late April.

When I took a temporary gig as VP-Editorial at Philly.com a few months ago, I wrote that I probably wouldn't be able to say much in this blog about what we were doing while we rethought the site. Well, now I can: We launched the new version of Philly.com this weekend, and I think we've broken some important new ground in what it means to be a newspaper Web site.

To start with, the new Philly.com doesn't look like most other news Web sites. It doesn't have an endless collection of text links on the home page. Instead, it's got a clean, elegant design (by the good folks at the Philadelphia office of Avenue A/Razorfish) that highlights important content and is designed to move readers deeper into the site to find more. It makes very strong use of photos and video, in addition to text. It uses photo-illustrations of Philadelphia landmarks at the top of most pages so that there's no question that you're on a site about Philadelphia. In short, the new Philly.com has a strong personality and identity—unlike most newspaper sites, which generally lack local identity.

But those are just the cosmetics. Philly.com also tries to rethink what it is to be a newspaper site. Yes, the excellent content of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is front and center. But the site is not just about news. It's also full of guidance to living and visiting in the Philadelphia region, including events calendar searches on every page, to help readers find out what's going on around town besides what's in that day's news.

More importantly, Philly.com finally breaks free of being a one-way lecture to the audience. It's bristling with calls to action for reader participation, in comments, discussions, user-submitted reviews, photo and video uploading and other user-generated content. Highlights of that reader content are displayed on just about every page, so that visitors are invited to talk amongst themselves about what's on the site and what's going on around them. I don't think any news site as gone this far in encouraging reader involvement. Underlying this is an industrial-strength comment-management system that minimizes the amount of work the staff has to do to police all of this user interaction.

On top of that we've got dozens of reporter and columnist blogs, a growing number of video elements and shows, ubiquitous horizontal navigation to keep readers moving around the site, some cool tools from Aggregate Knowledge to help readers see what others like them are interested in, and much more.

And this is really only the beginning. As with any redesign and relaunch there were a few things that didn't make the deadline, most notably some social features, which will be phased in over the next few months. Philly.com will continue to grow and improve, but it's already light years ahead of where it was before this redesign. (For a glimpse at what it used to look like, see the screen-grab at left. The change is really dramatic.)

There are a number of people who deserve great credit for the new site, starting with Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney and Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who have strong ambitions for what the site can be and how it has to move from simply being a "newspaper site;" the aforementioned Avenue A/Razorfish, which delivered a great design (further polished by Jill Hoover and Jeff Aiken); Jennifer Musser-Metz, who did an incredible job project-managing the design and launch process; and the talented and hard-working production and tech teams at Philly.com, who brought it all together and will keep the site evolving and growing over the next weeks and months.

As you can tell, I'm very proud of what's been accomplished with the new Philly.com, and I'll be excited to see it get even better in the future. We're defining what makes a great newspaper site. Up next: Philly.com does hyperlocal. Watch this space.

An entertaining plea for less strident car ads from Giles Coren comes in today's Times. He suggests a future script for the things:

"Here's a car, it's much like all the others. If your own car is beyond repair this is one of the many essentially identical vehicles you might consider as a replacement."

Seconded - all future car ad script to take that form please.

(Admittedly any sort of enthusiasm for cars is utterly mysterious to me, from that alleged "sport" Formula Driving Round And Round In A Big Circle Until All But One Of Those Ludicrously Fragile Cars Has Crashed Or Broken Down Again, to what happens on Top Gear to the appeal of Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe car ads are exciting to people who care about cars. Then again, those people also seem to know about cars and will presumably therefore make informed buying decisions, so I'm back to square one as to what showing millions of hours of ads for dozens of utterly indistinguishable means of getting from A to B is really imagined to achieve. Perhaps simply no-one likes to buy a car they've never heard of.)

Ah, wifi in the garden, one of the better inventions of the early C21st. Apart from wifi I expect the main achievement of our generation will be remembered as the perfection of that strange waddle that allows a person to carry a full cup of hot coffee in an overcrowded public place. People have got incredibly good at that in the decade or so since Starbucks became ubiquitous and I occasionally wonder whether there's any proper use humanity could make of that widespread, entirely newfound and rigorously practiced talent.

Or indeed what else we could have learned instead in the same amount of time. I doubt it's a whole Wikipedia's worth of social surplus (already, I'm sure you'll agree, the standard measure of wasted man-hours - we should clearly start measuring our wasted hours in nano- or pico-wikipedias). But it might be close.

That’s right, I did it. I’ve broken in for the first time since leaving LR to offer my congratulations to Cory on his new job. It’s Cory’s fault - he left my password in tact, so let this be a warning to all you sysadmins out there to keep your password lists up to date!

Cory’s work at KING is nationally recognized for its excellence. He is, unquestionably, a leading mind in what we used to call “convergence” and what we now have no idea what the hell it’s called. Probably something digital. He has consistently been accurate in predicting where the media is going. Cory doesn’t let the naysayers bother him. Unlike me, for example. He just plugs along with what he knows is right.

Only Cory would continue an enterprise like LR this long, through job changes, blogger changes, life changes and now a major career step. He has got to be the only guy I know who, in a job negotiation, would insist “as long as I keep my labor intensive, non-money making, often thankless side project” as a deal breaker.

Thanks to the LR jobs section, there are many people in the industry who owe their careers to Cory. I certainly do. Now he’s made a big career step of his own. I congratulate him and Kate on this wonderful opportunity. As a self-proclaimed “expert,” I support this move. Also, Cory will be pleased to note, I even included artwork in an entry.

Ed Cone tells a story of an airline’s exquisite stupidity. He shows a picture of the jammed seats behind his jammed row 11 and the empty seats ahead and says:
What’s going on? An industry that has forgotten about customer service.

Almost nobody opted to pay $30 bucks extra to sit in “economy plus,” which promises a few inches of extra legroom. When it became clear that the flight would be packed six across from row 11 back while row after row sat empty in the front, people asked if they could move up. The flight attendants said no, you have to pay for those seats. Not very customer-friendly or situationally aware, but comprehensible.

So a guy asks if he could pay on the spot. Nope. People were laughing at the United’s cluelessness, but it wasn’t very friendly laughter.

When the drink cart came by I bought myself $5 worth of stress relief and asked the flight attendant (politely) why she could sell me a drink but not a seat. She looked at me like I had two heads and said they are in no way set up to take reservations, you have to do that with a service representative.

I started to say I didn’t want a reservation, I wanted to hand her $30 and move up one freaking row, but it felt like I was on the phone with Bangalore and couldn’t get a supervisor, so I just shut up and drank.

To recap: They don’t know how to allocate their seating categories, they aren’t going to let people spread out across a half-empty plane as a courtesy, and they turn down the chance to upsell on the spot, even though they do commerce in the aisles all the time.

What a stupid industry.

They’re so stupid they think their business strategy is to imprison passengers. They’re so stupid they don’t know how to take passengers’ money. They’re so stupid they don’t realize — or apparently care — how stupid they are. Too bad the all-powerful internet couldn’t give us all wings.

My colleague David Weintraub, who occupies the same nook as I do oh so far, far away from the main office, has been blogging for Black Star. Good stuff, especially if you are into teaching -- or learning -- visual communications.

David is an accomplished photographer. His latest post (yeah, yeah, try not to look at the date, OK; I said I was behind) is a good recap of the joys, mostly, of teaching the beginning and advanced photography classes. Some good thoughts, I think, that apply far beyond just photo classes:

• Here's the take-away message for me from all this: given something fun and creative to do, students will figure out the technical challenges -- this is their reward for being so-called digital natives. They still need to be taught the broad concepts: developing a story arc, shooting sequences and details, editing for maximum impact, and using audio effectively. (David was talking about having them do slide shows.)
  
• The students themselves told me they need more training in basic photographic principles -- good old f-stops and shutter speeds, lighting ratios, depth of field, etc. I think I've succumbed to the "set it on auto" syndrome. ... The fact is, the current crop of auto-everything digital SLRs are so good that you can hardly go wrong by using the auto setting. But what I heard from my students was instructive: they weren't learning much from letting the camera do the thinking. They wanted to be in control and, if need be, learn from their mistakes. (That's something we all can remember as more and more of this stuff just becomes turning to a site on the Web, be it audio, video, slide shows, site creation, etc.)
• I've found that teaching is a delicate balancing act: sometimes you provide as much information as possible, and sometimes you stand back and get out of the students' way. Knowing when to do which is a challenge.

Also, read two of his previous posts:

• What do you tell students who want to be photographers in the age of everyone-can-do-it photography? (Hint, that they need to realize they are not just photographers, but visual problem solvers. And I like David's implicit endorsement for why many vis comm students should take my editing class: They may also be called upon to write captions, press releases, articles, and produce infographics.)
• A solid piece exploring the bounds of ethical practices in visual communication.

As I told David, my only quibble isn't with him, but with Black Star, which has the blog set up rather weirdly. There is no way I have found to click on a link and see all the posts David has written. No archive of past posts, no clickable link on his name. And if you go into the main blog, rising.blckstar.com, and click backward, I'll be danged if I see any of his posts. Unless I'm being exceedingly dense (highly likely), Black Star is running afoul of some key points of the blogging ethos. It's also making it hard to know when to go to the site to read Weintraub since the RSS feed is of the main blog only, not broken down by contributor.

On the other hand, Black Star is using Joomla, which brilliantly is one of the few content management systems that allows you to immediately download a PDF of a post (yes, it's not that hard to print to PDF these days, but this one is formatted correctly the first time -- ever run into the fun of printing some sites in a Mozilla browser? -- and is quick). Again, a small quibble that so few sites seem to get -- include a URL in that printout. Maybe I want to hand it off to someone else who wants to see the thing digitally or who wants to cite it down the road.

Romenesko Letters
The authors of a Slate piece titled "Stealth Marketers" wondered if doctors were shilling for drug companies on an episode of The Infinite Mind called "Prozac Nation: Revisited" on public radio. "We stand by the program and its editorial content," says show producer Bill Lichtenstein. "To suggest that distinguished researchers such [the doctors who appeared on the show] are shills for the drug industry is bad journalism." || The authors of the Slate piece respond.

Shares of Blinkx, the UK video search company, shot up as much as 50 percent on rumors that Google and News Corp. may be looking to buy.

Interactive revenue for Tribune was flat from the first quarter of this year compared to last year, which “fits with a number of other publishers that have seen their interactive growth drop precipitously,” reports PaidContent.

VanityFair.com
Buzz Bissinger continues to discuss his tirade on Bob Costas' show last week, and how he feels about it now. "My apology is for the manner in which I expressed myself. I still believe what I said," he says. "I still believe that, particularly in the world of sports, blogs are dedicated to maliciousness and invective and cruelty."

> Only NYT, LAT and a few others are getting info from Myanmar (LAT)
> Miami Herald's Merzer takes buyout; joined the paper in '79 (BPBNT)
> Sacramento Bee business editor Anderson named features editor (TBN)
> Russert spoke the words he'd composed in his head months ago (Slate)
> Gartner's fine with "prickly" as long as it has the "ly" | Part two (DI)
> Six Flags CEO, ex-ESPN programmer Shapiro joins Tribune board (CT)
> Send link suggestions, letters, etc. to jromenesko@poynter.org
> Sign up to receive Romenesko by e-mail at noon ET
> Visit Romenesko's Obscure Store & Reading Room and Starbucks Gossip

Well, you’d never see this as a promotion from an American newspaper. I just caught this tweet from the Guardian’s Comment is free, in full:
“We can’t keep fucking flying stuff around the fucking globe like their’s no tomorrow. Fuckin ‘ell! We’re fucked”

Well, it did make me click. I thought it might be about American interventionism. No, it’s a reaction to chef Gordon Ramsey declaring that out-of-season vegetables should be outlawed.
The swearing-chef extraordinaire has declared war on out of season produce, suggesting that restaurants should be fined for using, say, strawberries in February.

The Michelin-starred chef thinks that both fruit and vegetables should be “locally sourced and only on menus when in season”. Not only does the produce taste better, but it also helps to cut carbon emissions by reducing the number of miles needed to transport them.

Oh, bloody ‘ell. So just to make ourselves feel good, let’s make a bunch of Mexican strawberry farmers and Chilean asparagus farmers — not to mention truckdrivers, ship crews, port crews, and supermarket help — unemployed. Priorities, people.

Remind me not to go to Ramsey’s restaurants in cabbage season.

The abrupt decline of the newspaper business in the United States is strongly correlated with the rapid adoption of inexpensive broadband Internet service – a phenomenon that likely threatens most other media companies throughout the world. That’s the conclusion of a presentation I delivered today to the annual world congress of the International Newspaper Marketing Association, which is meeting