Jeff Beckham

Much has been written already about the New York Times’ decision to end their TimesSelect subscription service. Check out some of the best here:

Jeff Jarvis
Staci Kramer
Rex Hammock
Dan Gillmor

As those folks point out, there’s more there than just freeing the Times columnists from behind a paywall. The Times is also opening up their archives for the [...]

[Read more →]

I’m an unabashed fan of Rob Curley. He recently posted a transcript from his interview with Northwestern’s Media Management Center for a report called “Running While the Earth Shakes: Creating an Innovation Strategy to Win in the Digital Age.”
Curley cuts to the chase in defining why newspapers have trouble in their approach to the web:
“So [...]

[Read more →]

No local publications were included among the finalists for the 2007 Online Journalism Awards.
The Houston Chronicle’s Science Guy was among the nominees in the Beat Reporting (Large) category.
Where last year’s awards were heavily populated with coverage of Hurricane Katrina, this year’s list includes several publications’ coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.
The winners will be announced [...]

[Read more →]

A couple of weeks ago, the Bivings Report published an analysis of US consumer magazines and the way they use the web. They looked at the top 50 commercial magazines (according to circulation).
Among their key findings:

More magazines are using reporter blogs in 2007 than in 2006. Fifty-eight percent of the magazines researched now [...]

[Read more →]

Texas Monthly Editor Evan Smith announced today on his blog that he’s hired Eileen Smith (no relation) as the first editor of the magazine’s website, TexasMonthly.com.
Eileen has run the In the Pink Texas site and been a senior editor at Pluck.
This should be an excellent hire for the magazine. I met Eileen briefly during a [...]

[Read more →]

The folks over at the Bivings Report have ranked the Austin American-Statesman’s website among their Top 10 Best Newspaper Websites in the United States.
Statesman.com came in at No. 8. The rankings said:
We really like the unique layout and coloring of this site’s homepage. We’re also giving this site points for allowing anyone to blog and [...]

[Read more →]

In addition to the occasional post here, I’ve begun writing at Austinist. Editor Allen Chen and the crew sent out a call for contributors and I was more than happy to be asked to participate. I’ll be writing mostly about Austin sports, but will slip in other posts, too.
My debut was today, with a post [...]

[Read more →]

There’s a nice interactive feature on Statesman.com that lets you search the Austin Police Department’s records for any property crime reported in 2006. What’s more, there’s a slick Google Maps interface that allows you to zoom in on the location and get more details, including whether the report led to an arrest.
You can search the [...]

[Read more →]

A year ago, the Alamo Drafthouse website was stuck in the 1990s, far behind the innovative approach to moviegoing that the actual Alamo experience brings. But Tim League and crew have kicked it in gear over the past 12 months, with a new design, a blog, and added functionality.
The Alamo folks just added another useful [...]

[Read more →]

Over at Read/Write Web, Josh Catone compares the recent redesigned sites for CNN, USA Today, and AOL News.
He gives the design edge to CNN, and the social-media advantage to USA Today (whose features are powered by Austin’s Pluck).

[Read more →]