new media

For me, the Super Tuesday round of primaries has one clear, across-the-board winner: The New York Times. Why? Because nytimes.com took advantage of one great advantages of the online medium over broadcasting, offering a wealth of highly local detail through a very nice drill-down interactive graphical interface.

The #1 national newspaper managed to be very local, offering me data on how the vote in Columbia County, Ga., where I live, compared with the vote in other counties in Georgia.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer," said psychologist Abraham Maslow, "you tend to see every problem as a nail." I thought about that as I examined a couple of recently launched websites: The Industry Standard and NotchUp, both of which bear the "beta" label acknowledging their concepts are only partially baked.

In an awesomely detailed post, the editor of Schamper, the student newspaper at the University of Gent (Belgium) describes how he -- a philosophy major -- built a Web-centric content management system that outputs to Adobe InDesign for print, all based on the open-source Drupal CMS framework. How integrated is it? Well, when an editor opens a story, it's locked so others can't modify it. When it's stored, the XML output is updated and InDesign refreshes the layout. And oh, by the way, there's also a public-facing website.

Dan Gillmor points to an incendiary post by Paul Conley, who declares, "you cannot train someone to be part of a culture" and "there's no room for Web newbies." Conley is writing about B2B (trade) journalism, but presumably the same position might be taken in regard to general journalism.

Registration has begun for Ifra's PublishAsia 2008, to be held April 2-3 in Macau, China. Macau is the former Portuguese colony on the Chinese coast.

The Web seems to be the major focus. Ifra's announcement cites these topics:

Morris has a significant opening for a Director of Audience Growth, based at corporate headquarters in Augusta, Ga., and working closely with Morris newspapers around the country.

Ben Compaine cites an economist's study of the Washington Post that provides "another data point" in the online paid-content discussion: