The New York Times Magazine Sunday supplement has been re-imagined for the web and an online version of this month’s ‘innovations issue’ went live on Friday, featuring 48 pages of responsive magazine content, complete with responsive advertising, built through HTML5.

John Niedermeyer, as lead designer of digital news at the New York Times, has spent much of the last month considering how people best consume online content, in anticipation of the latest issue of the Times’s Magazine. “When you translate things for digital, frequently there’s a loss of a lot of the things that make a magazine such a great thing to thumb through,” explained Niedermeyer, speaking to Journalism.co.uk. “So one of the goals of this project was to bring part of that art direction – typography, photography, the sort of nice magazine lay out – to the digital side.”

The tactile nature of this project – creating something “that was designed to be touched first” – was central to making it attractive for mobile and tablet users; incorporating gesture navigation to swipe between content either on a mobile or tablet device or using keys on a desktop.

The attractive, responsive and intuitive nature of these HTML5 projects are at the forefront of web design for presenting content digitally. Yet the developing technology’s uses is still at an early stage, said Niedermeyer.

Read all: http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/new-york-times-brings-magazine-experience-to-the-web/s2/a553247/

Laura Poitras, the award-winning documentary filmmaker gave her first since she helped reveal the scope of the National Security Agency’s digital surveillance. Poitras is still in Hong Kong, where she is filming the story behind the story — including her co-author on the Guardian story and former Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald — for her forthcoming documentary on whistle-blowers and leaks.

“I feel a certain need to be cautious about not wanting to do the work for the government,” she told Salon, but agreed to clarify some parts of her role in the story.

In a wide-ranging interview, she explained how she first made contact with Snowden, her reaction to the possible future investigation into his leaks, and why Edward Snowden didn’t go to the New York Times.

Read all: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/qa_with_laura_poitras_the_woman_behind_the_nsa_scoops/

Tuesday’s resounding election win by the B.C. Liberals has caught most people by surprise as polls, pundits and prediction markets were all forecasting a large win by the NDP. How could they all have been so wrong?

Traders in a prediction market aggregate news and information from a variety of sources, but misleading polls led them down the same path as the public. Only the few contrarian minds in UBC’s prediction markets foresaw the B.C. Liberals’ win – and made a more than handsome profit.

The prediction markets for the B.C. election had low participation compared to past campaigns. Without sufficient numbers of participants and liquidity, prediction markets fail to do their magic “crowd sourcing.”

Prediction markets have an advantage, though. If polls continue to have an anti-incumbency bias, traders will take this into consideration and adjust their positions. If polls influence the outcome, traders will be aware of this possibility from now on. Prediction markets have the potential to outperform polls through traders’ ability to learn and adapt and correct for the biases inherent in polls.

Read all: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/why-my-prediction-market-failed/article11985947/

One of the most talked about companies for online news right now isn’t a journalism outlet or a media conglomerate, but rather a small startup incubator and investor located in the heart of Manhattan’s meatpacking district.

“I think you can redefine a media company for this century,” Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told Mashable in an interview. “We are trying to do that from the ground up.”

He eventually settled on a few fundamental principles for such a company: It would be data-driven. It wouldn’t need to own all the expensive assets that traditional media corporations do. It would be more focused on distribution, but not tied to a particular method of distribution. It would be, as he puts it, a “loose federation of pieces.”

If you look at the companies Betaworks is currently developing or has large stakes in, you’ll notice a suite of media consumption products, like Digg and Instapaper, as well as the recently launched Tapestry, which aims to create a better reading experience for short stories, and the soon-to-launch Google Reader alternative, not to mention other products in the pipeline.

Borthwick refers to each of these as pieces of a puzzle, which collectively solve that question of creating a 21st century media company.

At the center of all that is Digg, which Borthwick says is the heart of Betaworks’ media ecosystem — at least for right now — in the same way search is the heart of Google’s ecosystem.

Read all: http://mashable.com/2013/05/07/betaworks-future/

Dutch journalist Rob Wijnberg made an appeal last month to the masses: invest in a digital news site–that doesn’t yet exist–that will provide a platform for long-form journalism and in-depth content detached from the typical breaking news cycle.

The site, created by Wijnberg and Momkai founder Harald Dunnink (pictured above), is slated to launch in September, according to De Correspondent’s blog. The platform they’re creating will be entirely advertisement free and focus on “slow journalism and background stories,” the founders wrote in a blog post.

The creators are developing a digital news site that takes a different approach to practices currently implemented by big media. The site will be updated daily, but will have content focused on more than just the issues of the day, according to the De Correspondent’s manifesto. The news site will not espouse a political ideology, just journalistic ideals, won’t have advertisers, but will have partners and will not go after a targeted group or demographic.

Read all: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/crowdfunding-news-a-media-experiment-takes-shape/16960

The idea behind prediction markets for companies is that the accumulation of informed opinion will be more accurate than the best guesses of ex­ec­utives. They have been billed as a way to tap communities of employees, consumers and experts to generate in­sights into issues affecting businesses and their operations, from product delivery schedules to marketing and quarterly sales.

But the prediction market revolution in business is taking longer than expected. The recent shutdown of Intrade, the Dublin-based prediction market, under scrutiny from the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission, revealed many of the challenges.

Donald Thompson, emeritus marketing professor at York University in Toronto, says: “There’s a culture . . . that the CEO is the smartest guy in the room. To change that and say everyone in the company has information that could make better decisions, including the receptionists, is a major culture change.

“No one wants to tell the CEO that maybe all of us are smarter than any of us. The other major issue is, who’s going to be embarrassed by the questions we ask? If you’re going to ask important questions, you’re going to challenge certain decision makers. You need a culture that allows this.”

Equally, trained forecasters do not want what they see as a gimmicky computer game re­placing their traditional tools. But, says Prof Thompson, the hostility is diminishing. The success of prediction markets in well populated fields such as politics and movies is increasing confidence in them.

Within 10 years, he bel­ieves, they will have replaced surveys. That would bring a new transparency to forecasting and allow un­heralded experts to emerge to challenge conventional wisdom.

Read all: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f03fc956-9586-11e2-a151-00144feabdc0.html

News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

Read all: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

The new version of the site was developed focusing on ease of use, flexibility, clarity and usability. Navigation was optimized and the process of making predictions has been completely redesigned to allow utilization on touch-only devices with small screens.

According to its integral concepts of being a community driven site, Knew The News adopted various user proposed improvements.

Constantinus van der Kruijs, owner of Knew The News, said: “It has been our concern that people should be able to use Knew The News from whatever device they have at hand ever since. Web technology has evolved over the past years, so this goal became feasible, but no less compulsive.”

Ensuring a level playing field for all members of Knew The News regardless the device they use, lead to the decision to abolish the original idea to offer separate mobile web site. Instead, the Knew The News website itself has been revised to implement state of the art web technologies. These allow the website to optimize its appearance depending on the screen size of the device the visitor uses.

“The redesign will allow Knew The News to be used by people who use the internet on their smartphone, or non stationary,” added van der Kruijs, mentioning that “it is one of a number of major revision the site will undergo during 2013.”

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