The Jeff Beckham Weblog

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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).

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Back in November, the New York Times wrote a profile on Brian Stelter, the 21-year-old writer of the TVNewser.com blog, which has gained prominence as the place to go for inside news on the television industry. Earlier this week, the Times has now hired Stelter as a staff writer for their Business section. It’s a [...]

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The always-insightful Scott Karp wonders whether local newspapers should compete with local TV stations by producing their own news video.
Equipping reporters with a video camera along with the traditional pen and notepad gives local papers another outlet for distributing information, and, as Scott points out, another way to reach out to local advertisers.
To quote [...]

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Via Mr, Magazine comes notice that British newspaper The Independent merged all of its sections in the Sunday paper into one big newspaper section and one big magazine. It’s too early to speculate on whether this would be a successful strategy, but as Mr. Magazine points out, North American is “the only continent that has [...]

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Jeff Jarvis passes along word that the Greensboro (NC) News & Record, one of the papers that people point to as one that has embraced the Internet in the right way, announced layoffs last week. It shows that even though a paper may make the right moves to adjust to today’s news-sharing environment, the economic [...]

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Ryan Sholin’s blunt and right-on assessment of the challenges facing newspapers. Stop whining, he says, and start building your own piece of the new world.

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I found the nicest email in my Inbox today from Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black. He’s given me permission to post it here:

Jeff,
I’ve been meaning to e-mail you for quite some time to offer you my deepest thanks. It really was your drive by consulting that mobilized me to really expand the Chronicle’s on line [...]

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