The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Bit by bit, the Austin Chronicle has been adding more features and functionality to its website. Recently, they added the ability to leave comments on stories, and I noticed today they added a blog for local sports. Congratulations to the Chronicle staff for making steady progress this summer on their web efforts.

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Netscape.com, which relaunched in June with a hybrid journalism model, is looking for Austin talent to bolster its editing staff. This listing on craigslist gives the details. Under the hybrid model, Netscape editors take stories that are ranked highest by readers, then they follow up, adding context and detail.

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Business Week’s Best of the Web provides a good overview of today’s most popular websites and blogs.
Of the 13 bloggers profiled as the top choices from BusinessWeek.com readers, eight of them are 40 years old or order. A ninth, Henry Blodget, is 39.

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As Texas said goodbye to former governor Ann Richards this week, one of the memorable images was the famous Texas Monthly cover photo of Richards astride a white Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The image itself wasn’t “real” — it was pieced together from different photographs. Former Texas Monthly art director DJ Stout tells Design Observer the story [...]

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The first round of voting for South by Southwest Interactive panels has now closed, but in the meantime there have been more than 160 new panel ideas submitted over the past month. There are some good ones in this batch, too, so if you’re interested in helping choose the panels, cast your vote at: http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker.

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Friday was the last day for more than 100 Dallas Morning News employees who accepted severance packages. The buyouts shrank the size of the newsroom by roughly 20 percent.
Already, many of the former employees have started blogs to keep in touch, write about their experiences in their final days at the News, and to keep [...]

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The Austin Chronicle’s website has added a host of RSS feeds, for those who like to get their news delivered in that fashion.
My favorites are the Recommended Events and Current Films.
Others include:

All Sections
News
Arts
Books
Food
Screens
Music
Features
Columns

A list of feeds from other Austin media outlets can be found here.

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In today’s Business section, the Statesman has a story about Blastro.com, a hip-hop video site based in Austin. The main thrust of the story — a small company run by guys who love what they’re going is finding some success — is fine. However, I found some of the numbers cited and the classification of [...]

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Spinning off the Bivings Report post from the other day, Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post’s interactive division says he was inspired to collect his current thinking on what newspaper sites need to do.
The result is a fascinating look at how structured the information in a newspaper is, and how to make use of [...]

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Writing at Editor & Publisher, Steve Outing makes the case that:
Newspapers should think small because of the nature of the Internet, and because the Internet is critical to the future of newspapers. They still need to better adapt to doing business in an environment where the next generation of readers/customers chooses to interact with them [...]

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