Jeff Beckham

This month’s Texas Monthly media preview story is “Capture the Flag“, Paul Burka’s terrific take on the Texas governor’s race.
Like they did with last month’s story by Virginia Postrel on her kidney donation, Texas Monthly releases the full story as an online preview to a group of media members to gain attention for the upcoming [...]

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There’s been a lot of attention today around the launch of the New Netscape. The site takes stories that are ranked highest by readers, then has an editor or writer follow up on the story, adding context and detail.
This hybrid approach (editor + collective) is fascinating, and it’s remarkable that Jason Calacanis and his team [...]

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The Austin Chronicle is hiring a part-time Assistant Web Developer to help with new applications, RSS feeds, multimedia content, blogs, and other interactive features.
There was good discussion here back in May about the improvements the Chronicle should make to its web site. This appears to be a step in addressing those needs.
The job is 20 [...]

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In the Pink Texas reports today that Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka is preparing to launch a blog. Burka, a senior executive editor at the magazine, told me via email:
“That’s the plan. Most of the details are yet to be determined. I’ll let you know more when I know more.”

Burka has been writing for Texas Monthly [...]

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Steve Rubel’s column in Advertising Age suggests that publishers who do not offer full-text format news feeds (supported by advertising) could face long-term ramifications.
Previously:
Pheedo: Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates
Statesman Takes a Step Back on RSS Feeds

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Robert Niles of Online Journalism Review published an email interview this week with Adrian Holovaty, the Web tech guru at Washingtonpost.com.
Among the more intriguing parts of the exchange is the discussion of the difference between collecting information (which newspapers do well) and structuring the information so that it can be sorted, searched, and manipulated for [...]

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Today’s news about the killing of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led me to check the website of Stratfor, a private intelligence company headquartered here in Austin.
I noticed that over the past two months, the company has been producing daily podcasts for its registered users, in which founder George Friedman and his analysts provide brief [...]

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Via Steve Rubel and paidContent.org, I saw that a few magazines have begun offering PDF versions of their publication in iTunes. They’re small, specialty titles so far - do-it-yourself magazine Make, Wikinews, and music mag Fader - but iTunes could provide a way for these niche publications to reach a wider audience.

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A couple of items in today’s news about the progress that online media is making in advertising and audience reach:
Online Newspaper Ads Gaining Ground on Print: In the first quarter of this year, newspaper print ad spending increased 0.3 percent, while online ad spending increased 35 percent. In actual dollars, spending for online ads is [...]

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Microsoft’s The 10 Show is offering a video demonstration of its new “Times Reader”, application, which is the newspaper viewing program they’re developing in conjunction with The New York Times. I posted earlier about Times Reader here, and said that initial reaction had been skeptical. That said, the demo is nicely done. They show how [...]

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