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Tumblr to End Storyboard

April 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The company did not give much explanation for why it decided to close the site suddenly and dismiss a skeletal staff of three. When the blog opened, it garnered a lot of attention for its innovative approach to storytelling.

In a blog post, David Karp, the company’s co-founder, praised the site’s achievements and then said simply: “What we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on.”

Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with the research firm Altimeter, based in San Mateo, Calif., offered one common theory. “Tumblr has taken in a lot of money and is trying to get to profitability this year,” she said. “They are looking to cut anything that does not contribute to the bottom line. I think it may be as simple as that.”

The significance of the decision was being debated online Wednesday because Tumblr was not alone among social media sites in producing its own newslike content, often with experienced journalists.

In 2011, Flipboard hired the former Time executive Josh Quittner as editorial director. The same year the professional networking site LinkedIn hired Daniel Roth, the head of Fortune.com, to run its editorial operations.

But not all of the experiments have been successful. For example, in January 2012, Facebook hired a recent journalism school graduate, Dan Fletcher, to be its managing editor. Mr. Fletcher’s rather amorphous job seemed to be to write stories about trends on Facebook. Last month, he announced he was leaving. He said that Facebook did not need reporters and that articles detracted from activity on Facebook, which he said was inherently more interesting.

Where onlookers stood on the seriousness of the loss of Storyboard depended on whether they believed that it was a legitimate outlet in the first place or merely a failed marketing experiment.

While Storyboard’s staff insisted that they were doing high-quality feature journalism, they were not shy in admitting that it was in service of promoting Tumblr. In an interview last December, on the online news site Capital, which covers New York, Storyboard’s editor in chief, Chris Mohney, said, “What we’re doing is marketing as journalism.”

But marketing as journalism was not also seen as a fit for the social media site.

“Tumblr’s Storyboard and editorial operation never made any sense to me. Guess I am not the only one,” Charlie Warzel, deputy technology editor at Buzzfeed.com, an online news site that has its own reporters but also has content sponsored by advertisers, wrote in a Twitter post.

In a phone interview, he added, “It is always peculiar when a social network branches out into publishing, it just seems odd to bring on even excellent editorial talent to cover what is already going on organically.”

The demise of Storyboard seemed to be taken hardest by other online journalists. Tumblr had not hired marketing people but journalists from more traditional outlets to run Storyboard. Jessica Bennett, Storyboard’s executive editor, had previously been at Newsweek/ The Daily Beast.

Her social media posts indicate that she was outside New York when Tumbr made its decision and that she was surprised by it. Ms. Bennett declined to be interviewed for this article.

Ms. Etlinger said she appreciated that journalists were disappointed but said that online news was still in a very experimental stage.

“I think we are going to see a lot of failed experiments before we see a form of journalism that makes money online,” Ms. Etlinger said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/business/media/tumblr-to-end-storyboard.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Bucks Blog: The Least (and Most) Expensive Cars to Insure

January 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A 2013 Ford EdgeFord Motor Co.A 2013 Ford Edge

Not many people consider insurance when they go car shopping, but your premiums can vary a fair bit depending on the type of car you buy. Insure.com each year compiles a list of the 20 least (and most) expensive cars to insure, and a number of S.U.V.’s and crossover vehicles are among the cheapest for the 2013 model year.

In the past, minivans have dominated the list of “least expensive” rankings; last year, for instance, the vehicle listed as cheapest to insure was the Toyota Siena LE.

This year, just two minivans (the Dodge Caravan SXT and the Honda Odyssey EX-L) made the least-expensive list. The vehicle that cost the least to insure was the Ford Edge SE, with an average premium of $1,128. (There are eight other cars on the list that come in under $1,200 as well).

Amy Danise, Insure.com’s editorial director, said in an e-mail that the dearth of minivans on this year’s list is “notable.” Shifts in rankings occur because of insurance claims made over the last year, she said, so when “good” drivers gravitate toward different vehicles, the list changes. This year, the data indicated that drivers of the Ford Edge and the other cars on the least-expensive list have submitted fewer and less-expensive claims than drivers of other vehicles. “That means they’ve had fewer crashes and repair costs are likely not high for the vehicle,” she said.

Even if you are a “bad” driver, she continued, you can benefit from buying a vehicle on the least-expensive list. That’s because even if you have strikes against you on your driving record, choosing a vehicle that’s cheaper to insure can help hold down your costs.

The site also offers a tool that allows you to find national or state average insurance rates for more than 750 cars.

To compile the lists, Insure.com hired Quadrant Information Services to provide average rates for more than 750 car models from six large insurance companies (Allstate, Farmers, Geico, Nationwide, Progressive and State Farm), in 10 ZIP codes per state. Rates were not available for all models, especially the more exotic ones.

The annual rates shown are based on insurance for a single, 40-year-old man who commutes 12 miles to work each day, with policy limits of “100/300/50″ ($100,000 for injury liability for one person, $300,000 for all injuries and $50,000 for property damage in an accident), with a $500 deductible on collision and comprehensive coverage. The hypothetical driver has a clean record and good credit, and the rate includes uninsured motorist coverage. (Actual rates vary depending on individual driver factors, Insure.com notes.)

In addition to the Ford Edge SE, other models that can offer insurance savings, Insure.com says, include the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo, the Subaru Outback 2.5i Premium, the Kia Sportage and the Jeep Patriot Sport.

The list of most-expensive cars to insure includes many Mercedes-Benz models. The 2013 Mercedes-Benz CL600 has the most expensive rates, at $3,357. Other costly models include cars from Porsche, Jaguar and BMW.

How expensive is your car to insure?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/the-least-and-most-expensive-cars-to-insure/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Your Money Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder Blog: Amid Criticism, CNN Defends Reporting on Ambassador’s Journal

September 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Despite a third day of vociferous criticism from the State Department, CNN executives on Monday strongly defended the decision to base some of their reporting about Libya on the private diary of J. Christopher Stevens, the ambassador who was slain in an attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

CNN continued to maintain that it was pursuing a story of national interest in reports by Anderson Cooper on his prime-time program last week. Those reports used information about the security situation in Libya that was first gleaned from the diary, which was found by a CNN reporter in the wreckage of the consulate.

The network said it was accommodating the family’s wishes by not quoting specifically from the diary and instead basing its reporting on secondary sources to support the contention that the ambassador had been concerned about security threats.

But Philippe Reines, a State Department spokesman, accused CNN of violating an agreement it had made with the Stevens family not to use any information from the diary without the family’s permission. “They agreed it would not be used until they heard back from the family,” Mr. Reines said Monday, noting that he was on the phone call when the promise was made. “There was no ambiguity.”

The disagreement has embroiled the network and the State Department in a heated and somewhat murky debate involving journalistic ethics and internationally sensitive information, made all the more raw by the grief of the Stevens family and the ambassador’s colleagues in the diplomatic corps. Mr. Reines has sharply criticized CNN for several days, and on Saturday called its actions “disgusting” and “indefensible.”

CNN executives said that there was some ambiguity involved, chiefly in what was said between Richard T. Griffiths, a senior editorial director, and Tom Stevens, the ambassador’s brother, in the phone conversation to which Mr. Reines referred. That conversation took place on Sept. 14, the day the diary was discovered and the day a memorial service for Mr. Stevens was held in Washington.

“It was a murky call,” a senior CNN executive said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the network was limiting public response to comments made by Mark Whitaker, the managing editor of CNN Worldwide, on Monday morning.

Mr. Whitaker said on CNN’s morning program: “When we talked to the family, their main concern was they wanted the physical journal back and they didn’t want personal details from the journal revealed. We felt we had to respect that, and as a result, we didn’t report on the existence of the journals or any of those details.”

In a statement, CNN said, “The reason CNN ultimately reported Friday on the existence of the journal was because leaks to media organizations incorrectly suggested CNN had not quickly returned the journal, which we did. We reached out to the family of Ambassador Stevens within hours of retrieving the journal and returned it through a third party, within less than 24 hours from the time we found it.”

But as of Monday the physical copy of the diary was not in the possession of the family, according to Mr. Reines. The third party was a representative of the Italian delegation in Libya, whom the State Department asked to pick up the diary from Arwa Darmon, the CNN reporter who had found it.

But Mr. Reines said that continuing violence in Libya had prevented the Italian intermediary from reaching Tripoli, Libya, the only place where a flight out of the country can be arranged.

Mr. Reines said the Stevens family instead received a transcript of the contents of the diary from CNN. Network executives believed that was sufficient in fulfilling its obligation to make sure the family had seen the contents before it began using the material to inform their reporting.

Since that first exchange, the Stevens family has had no contact with the network. CNN executives said calls to the family had not been returned since then.

Efforts to reach Tom Stevens were not successful Monday, and Mr. Reines, who has been in contact with him, said Mr. Stevens was declining to comment on the family’s reaction to CNN’s decision.

Many journalists have come to CNN’s defense in general, saying that the network is a news organization and that what was in the diary was undoubtedly news.

“It doesn’t seem to me that CNN did anything in any way inappropriate,” said Geneva Overholser, director of the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. While acknowledging the wishes of the family were important, she said the use of information from the diary to pursue other interviews seemed to comport with the standard journalism technique of using material on background — that is, not to be quoted directly.

She added that if CNN could be faulted for anything it was not revealing initially that it had access to Mr. Stevens’s diary. “To me the key, as it is so often, is transparency in all things.”

But Mr. Reines disagreed. “Everyone is making this about the theological rights of reporters,” he said. “That’s not it. Whatever compelling journalistic standards CNN thought they had that let them report it, they had all those data points before they made a single call to the family.”

The reaction against CNN from the State Department has been so vituperative that it has led to questions of whether the department was seeking to drown out a central element of the reporting — that the consulate was poorly defended and unprepared for the attack, which came on the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Mr. Reines denied that.

The State Department has said it was adequately prepared. It has created a panel to investigate the attack, and F.B.I. investigators will also be involved in trying to determine what happened.

Mr. Reines described his harsh reaction to CNN’s decision in terms of sensitivity to the Stevens family at a time of tragedy. As an example of the raw nerve the attack has struck, Mr. Reines said he had refused to look at the transcript of the diary, which CNN sent to him to be forwarded to the family.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said, citing the intense emotions at the State Department surrounding the loss of Mr. Stevens. “So when the transcript comes in, there’s this taboo.”

He said he had not forwarded the transcript to anyone else at the department. But he conceded there was a chance that the contents might reveal some useful information about the attacks, intelligence that could help the effort to bring the perpetrators to justice, as President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have promised.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/cnn-managing-editor-defends-reporting-based-on-ambassadors-journal/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Link by Link: Dealing With an Identity Hijacked on the Online Highway

September 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

For those not in on the joke, Mr. Santorum’s torment is that when you look up his last name on Google, and the Bing search engine as well, you encounter a made-up definition of “Santorum” meant to ridicule him in a way that isn’t remotely fit to be described in a family newspaper.

And Mr. Santorum has responded in a way that only holds himself up to more ridicule. He has taken aim at Google, telling the Web site Politico last week: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their Web site or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle, but I suspect that’s not true.”

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The immediate reaction to Mr. Santorum’s statement has largely been, “How quaint. He thinks he can get Google to fix the Internet for him if he asks?” Mr. Santorum could have hurt his cause more only if he had told the company’s officials to roll up their sleeves and put a plug in the tubes carrying the offensive material.

Google had its own response to Mr. Santorum: “Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web,” the company explained helpfully, concluding with a summation of its philosophy: “We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”

Its advice? “Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the company wrote. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the Web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

That advice is particularly unhelpful in Mr. Santorum’s case, however, since the new definition of “Santorum” was explicitly created by Dan Savage — the editorial director of the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger and inspiration for the anti-gay bullying campaign “It Gets Better” — to punish him for his comments in 2003 on gay marriage.

In an interview with The A.P., Mr. Santorum, who was then a senator from Pennsylvania, listed other types of relationships that likewise should not be recognized by the government: “That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

Mr. Savage did not respond to an e-mail asking how he would react if Mr. Santorum were to ask him to remove the mocking definition, but on his paper’s blog he has shown no sign of relenting. In August, he took note of criticisms of him from the right and wrote they “can say whatever they like about us,” adding, “but we’re not allowed to challenge or mock them because that wouldn’t be civil.”

But Mr. Savage’s thoughts should be beside the point. The question is best directed at the search engines. And Google’s defense — that the behavior of its ever-improving algorithm should be considered independent of the results it produces in a particular controversial case — has a particularly patronizing air, especially when it comes to hurting living, breathing people.

That’s not to say that Google’s beliefs aren’t consistent. In 2004, according to a history of Google, “In the Plex,” by Steven Levy, Sergey Brin was tempted to be subjective after receiving complaints that a search for “Jew” gave an anti-Semitic Web site as its first result.

He was angered by the results, but as Mr. Levy tells it: “The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. ‘I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,’ he said. ‘It is a bad technology practice.’ ”

But there was a case similar to Mr. Santorum’s where an offensive image of Michelle Obama was dropped from the top results. A search for “Michelle Obama” led viewers to a grotesquely racist photo much reported in 2009. Google placed its own ad above those results, saying: “We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google. Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet.”

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Again, it was the algorithm that took the hit, and washed away accountability.

That the offensive Michelle Obama photo no longer shows up today is not because of specific filtering, Google said at the time the change was detected, but rather a reflection of a better algorithm.

The blog Search Engine Land, which has followed the many twists and turns in offensive search results, explained the change in an August post as follows: “If you’re wondering why the offensive image doesn’t show up anymore on searches for ‘michelle obama,’ Google says it’s because of algorithmic improvements, not any specific filtering on her name. The spokesperson said that the company’s internal metrics show that they’re doing a much better job of identifying the authoritativeness of individual images — and the offensive image is not authoritative for Michelle Obama’s name.”

By those lights, it is hard to understand how the current rankings for a search of Santorum are authoritative — who exactly would type in that word genuinely curious to learn about a made-up term as opposed to a controversial candidate for president?

Douglas Bowman, Google’s first outside designer, wrote on his personal blog in 2009 after leaving the company of his experience trying to instill an aesthetic vision there, recounting the now legendary story of Google’s testing 41 shades of blue to see which was the best.

“When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems,” he wrote candidly. “Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data.”

To say that Google is losing something by neglecting the human touch isn’t to mean that the algorithm isn’t reflecting humanity — after all, a motivated person created the page that tops the results for “Santorum.” But it is putting the opportunistic and sensationalistic ahead of a rare human quality: discretion.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dbc68e03726b26fe12faf2b012eede27

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,