As everyone who follows news closely has noticed, the big breaking news story is easily available. If you are on any social network following news outlets or have news hound friends, the bare facts of the major stories (Michael Jackson dies, Congress revokes Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) appear almost instantly. So what value can a news organization truly add with a mobile phone app? As the host of a daily news/talk show, I’m intent on staying up on news. Here’ s a look at the mobile apps from five leading news sources with commentary on their individual strengths and a few thoughts about where they fall short. All were used on an iPhone 3Gs.

AP MOBILE – Fast and comprehensive, it’s a quick way to follow up on the headlines and see photos while on the move. It allows you to designate one or more locations under the ‘Local’ tab. Seattle users see headline from the Seattle Times and Seattle P.I., but the story list is incomplete. Many top Seattle Times stories are withheld. It has an option to send photos and video, but that’s buried  under the ‘More’ tab. It’s got the best weather option I’ve seen but developers could add more categorization to the ‘Local’ tab. Under the current configurations sports, tech and breaking news are bunched together.

CNN – Like AP, it’s a good first stop for an overview of national and international stories. The ‘My CNN’ tab includes local stories from KING5 TV and local blogs, but lacks the depth the Seattle Times and P.I. stories provide. The big draw is watching the TV stories and live feeds from breaking news events like presidential press conferences. Prominently featured is the ‘I-Report’ tab, an entire section of user-generated videos and stories. You are encouraged to report by uplinking video and there is even an assignment page where the day I looked users were assigned winter news reports.

Read more…

Wharton Professor Eric Clemons joins us at noon today to talk about his provocative article on why advertising is dying on the web.

The presses fall silent as one of England’s premiere newspapers goes online with 140 characters max.

2020: What’s Next for News Is Dan Conover’s bold look ahead is the best I’ve seen. One emerging trend he spots is ‘predictive intelligence’.

Modern journalism is based on the idea that impartially telling “both sides” of a story is more useful than “taking sides.” This approach has limited value in an information-rich environment where the goal is finding the signal in the noise. Credibility, therefore, is likely to move toward information sources that demonstrate their understanding of events and situations via predictive accuracy rather than claims of non-predictive objectivity.

The Berkman Center just rolled out a tool to track what topics are covered by news outlets. It’s called Media Cloud. There’s a good explanatory video with creator Ethan Zuckerman here.

You can type in a term and compare how much coverage it gets from a variety of media sources, mainstream and blogs. The tool is designed to help researchers figure out the relationship between citizen media and mainstream media. Does one follow the other? Is citizen media too US focused?

Looks like it’s worth bookmarking if you’re planning doing research on news.

Twitter is mocked on Daily Show and Colbert Report, adopted by NPR’s Daniel Shorr, and dissed by The Seattle Times Danny Westneat. Monday on The Conversation (Noon, KUOW 94.9), what does Twitter mean to you? Our own Kathy Gill will explain. Our skeptic will be Michael Huntsberger, Professor of Communications Studies, Furman University, Greenville S.C.. He wrote

“I’m not sure that Twitter is such a great thing, because it allows people to communicate without reasonable consideration.  Twitterers bypass logic and simply react.  I find this especially troubling when we’re talking about members of Congress.  Some say the instantaneous nature of Twitter “humanizes” users.  I believe it dehumanizes them, like a pack of dogs barking at every passing siren.  In a democracy, the bar for civic participation needs to be a lot higher.”

Woof!

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This Associated Press story asks if billions are spent to fund broadband to unserved areas will it do any good?  Will new people sign up for broadband (51% say they’re not interested)? Will there be a “network effect” creating new jobs?

I wonder if the money were spent to upgrade the current system to make it cheaper and faster (think South Korea) whether that would be a better way to stimulate new business opportunities, more broadband users, new applications?