I wanted to take this moment to share some information about both the site I work for and my experiences there thus far. The founder of ReadWriteWeb, Richard MacManus, has given a few interviews lately during his trips to the U.S. and he does a great job describing the site and what makes it unique. Here’s a video from an interview with ABC News Radio’s Dan Patterson.

And for a longer discussion about the site, our process, marketing, advertising, etc – check out this interview Richard gave to Cali Lewis and John P. on the Wealth Nation podcast.

In six months at RWW, I have written 325 articles with over 1,500 comments on topics ranging from advice for startups, to general breaking tech news to my personal trend/niche beat – augmented reality. I’ve had the chance to travel to Boulder for Startup Week, to Mountain View for the RWW Mobile Summit, to Santa Clara for the Augmented Reality Event, and most recently to San Diego for Qualcomm’s Uplinq 2010.

I’ve learned from my time at RWW that I want to make tech journalism my career, and I’m lucky to have such a great start to it. I’ve taken a few steps towards furthering this goal, including doubling the RAM on my iMac, buying a second monitor for increased productivity, and bestickering my laptop like any self-respecting blogger.

So anyway, here’s to the next sixth months, during which I will hopefully have more fun and news to share.

This is a bit of a sidetrack from this story and it will make sense in a second, but have you ever been to the website TVTropes.org? Basically its a wiki for the various plot lines and jokes you see in TV and movies over and over again. One such trope is the “And The Winner Is” gag, where an award is being announced and an over-confident favorite assumes he or she has won and just as they’re standing up, the name called by the presenter is someone else’s (sometimes an unlikely underdog).

Okay, so this exact thing didn’t happen to me, but it was eerily similar. See, it turns out my school had won two awards in this category so a fellow student who worked on another project was there also, as well as a few faculty and staff from the school.

Names were not associated with the awards as they were announced (class names were used instead), and when my award was announced, something got mixed up between the other student and one of the faculty members and they wound up jumping up and accepting the award. She also happened to be sitting at the end of the aisle, which made their trip to the front of the room quick.

My ass was quite literally an inch off my seat to stand up and go get the award when I saw the other student jump up and hustle to the front. Then her award was announced next and she got up again.

Later on after the small ceremony was over, everyone realized the mistake and a few apologies were extended, but I really didn’t care to be honest. Sure, the award is a fine accomplishment, and it will find a nice comfortable spot on my resume and portfolio, but I wasn’t distraught over not getting to walk up, shake some stranger’s hand, and snag a box of plaques (which were immediately handed over to school faculty).

To be honest the “ceremony”, if you can call it that, was pretty lame. It was one session in a long series of awards events, and thus it was in a tiny room the size of a schoolroom, and about a dozen people were actually there. Woopity doo. It was scheduled for 2:45-4:30, and the thing was done by 2:55, so I’m not upset that the actual 10 minutes of this trip that I came for didn’t go as planned. No big deal, whatsoever.

I’ve seen and done so much more interesting things while I’ve been here. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you saw me mention seeing a pair of street-dwellers argue iPad vs. Kindle, and just tonight I passed a lounge in Bally’s where a decent sized band and sexy gogo dancers were pumping up their pittance of an audience with only the sexiest, funkiest, rockin’est song out there — that’s right, “Party in the U.S.A.” by Ms. Miley Cyrus.

I also got to see the Cirque du Soleil Beatles “LOVE” show at The Mirage tonight, and I must say that it is quite honestly the most amazing production of any sort I have ever witnessed. It was also the closest thing to a live Beatles concert I will ever get the chance to see. By that I mean I got to listen to the best songs of The Beatles with a large energetic crowd (not as many screaming girls, though the sounds were pumped in at one point), smoke machines, lazers, lighting effects, projections, dancing, and of course, at a loud volume in an intimate setting.

Aside from the Beatles side of the show, the visual production was absolutely stunning. I’m sure the other CdS shows are equally mind-blowing, but I think having this one set to popular music with well known themes (World War II, The 60s and hallucinogenic drugs to name a few) made this even more enjoyable. That being said, the dancers, actors, acrobats, gymnasts and everyone else involved in the show were ridiculously amazing to watch perform.

What I liked best about the show was the variety of activities going on from song to song. There was acting going on with basic choreography, there was elegant traditional dancing, modern dancers, break dancers, athletic balancing acts, gymnastic performers twirling and bouncing around, free running style choreography that was very much like Parkour, roller-skaters doing half-pipe style tricks (give those X-Games kids a job!), trampoline tricks, arial acrobatics, bungee rope dancing, guys on stilts, prop artists, rope climbers (many of which are clearly risking their lives each night to perform these feats of balance and acrobatics), and SO SO SO SO much more.

Every few songs there were projected video interludes featuring silhouettes of the Fab Four being their usual joking self which often included off-the-record recordings from studio sessions in which they joked around and riffed on their songs. And the other major amazement from the show was the amazing feats of set design. The floor had various portions that would raise or lower (several feat below the main level, you couldn’t see the bottom from where I was (which was almost in the last row), and there were intricate props that made the show even more stunning than just the performers.

At one point, a dream is symbolized by four kids (young versions of the Beatles) riding a bed through the clouds. The bed was on wires and the sheets of the bed were pulled out by other cast members and seemed to go on forever (like a cloun pulling a kerchief from his pocket). They ran up the aisles of the round theater and covered half the audience and waved the sheets to symbolize the clouds as the bed floated around. It was amazing.

During the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds portion, the room went pitch black and wires with a string lights on them lowered throughout the theater. A light production which played out to emphasize parts of the music appeared using the strands of lights (kinda like Christmas tree lights), and since they had been lowered all around, it was like seeing stars in the sky in 3D.

The music is amazing too, not just because its The Beatles, but because of the job the producers did of mixing, blending and breaking down the tunes. They were also digitally remastered, and they sound amazing. I’ve had the soundtrack for a few years now, but it was great to hear it on a huge sound system with the visual presentation.

To sum up, the show had be saying “Wow” every time I wasn’t signing along to the songs. I’ve seen a lot of cool shit in my life, and this show ranks up there with the best of it all. I highly recommend it to anyone, it is certainly worth every penny of the high-priced tickets.

If you don’t know Joe, he’s an interesting character who has a love/hate relationship with the local media. At times, he will pull stunts, like marching prisoners down the street in pink overalls, because he knows the media will show up. Other times, he’s chewing out journalists for printing lies about him and his staff.

He recently visited the Cronkite School to speak in a forum discussion with some of the journalism professors there. Unfortunately he left early when some protestors began singing Bohemian Rhapsody with immigration rights lyrics substituting the original words. He is a polarizing figure, and Hensley and Stern are on a first name basis with the man.

Check out this week’s interview to learn what it’s like to shadow one of the nation’s most controversial political figures. Stern and Hensley also provide their take on the rumors that Joe might run for the governorship of Arizona, so listen to hear their take!

The company, which includes other properties like the Boston Globe and About.com, opened a full dollar higher than where it closed yesterday and increased steadily all day to $10.72 a share for a 22.5% growth.

In a letter to employees, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger stated that the company is “moving in the right direction” thanks to employee comittment.

“Ultimately, it is your extraordinary dedication that is allowing us to achieve the results that we have reported today … and it is this same dedication that will enable us to achieve our long-term goals and aspirations.” – Arthur Sulzberger

But in reality the answer is simpler than putting the proverbial nose to the grindstone as Sulzberger claims.

Earlier this week, the New York Times announced they would be cutting 100 newsroom positions before the end of year.  With increasing subscription costs and re-negotiation of severance pay, these cuts are just the latest in the company’s efforts to lower costs.

It worked.

Sulzberger even concedes this point, saying, “while actual circulation volume has declined, our circulation revenue increased 6.7 percent due to price increases” but qualifies that statement by adding, “clearly, the demand for our quality journalism in print remains substantial.”

But is this really “the right direction” as Sulzberger contends? Is it truly healthy for the New York Times Company to keep its head above water with budget cuts, price increases and layoffs?  Obviously this can’t continue forever, and the company will need to improve upon its floundering advertising revenues to remain in business.

Sulzberger believes things are turning around on the advertising front.

“Early in the fourth quarter, print advertising trends have improved modestly compared to the third-quarter, while digital advertising trends are improving more significantly.” – Arthur Sulzberger

We all know the day the New York Times folds is the day pigs fly, hell freezes over and we all eat our hats, but for the company to continue to be a dominant force in the news industry they will have to recover from the advertising lull so they can continue to innovate and push newspapers in a new direction.

Last August, I joined the social networking site Twitter, where millions of people share their thoughts about everything and anything.  I wanted to know if anyone on Twitter was talking about my topic, so I threw a few word combinations at Twitter’s search engine.

Nothing much came up in my first few searches but eventually I got a few results by searching for “citizenship AND military.”  One of the results was particularly interesting.  It said:

“My heart breaks for him that can’t go in the military. He should B able to  serve the 4 yrs and B given the opportunity to get citizenship.”

The message was posted on April 9 by a user named “Yankeelin” and was the third “tweet” in a series about this individual.  Prior messages from the same user said:

“My daughters boyfriend Alberto is from Mexico too. He’s been here since he was 5.”

and

“…and he graduated H.S. as the top ranking ROTC cadet in NC, but his family and him are not legal. So he can’t go in the military!”

I found the story compelling, so I saved the links to the posts and forwarded them in an e-mail to my reporting partner for the summer project. The subject line was: “Maybe we can use Twitter to find stories?”

On May 18th, the first day of the News21 program at Arizona State, I decided to follow up on this story but I wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed.  How does one approach a complete stranger on the Internet?

Yankeelin’s Twitter profile revealed that her name was Linda and lived in North Carolina.  A White Pages search of her name and hometown returned one result with a phone number, but I decided a less forward method of first contact might be more appropriate in this case.

On Twitter, you can send a message to other users by beginning a message with the “@” symbol followed by the person’s username.  One problem with this method is if the user does not log onto the service frequently, he or she could easily overlook this kind of direct message.

The other challenge was that Twitter limits each message you send to 140 characters, 11 of which I would be using up with “@yankeelin” and a space before my message.  So cramming an introduction and an explanation and a request to talk was going to be tough to do in 129 characters.  However, I managed to squeeze in the following message:

“@yankeelin Im a student studying latinos in milit, love to chat about ur daughters bf Alberto (saw ur tweet from april)- chcameron@gmail.com”

By sacrificing some punctuation (”I’m” became “Im”) and with the use of some well known Internet abbreviations (”ur” for “your” and “bf” for “boyfriend”), I was able to get my message across in exactly 140 characters.

A few days went by and I considered calling the phone number that the white pages search had turned up, but to my surprise, just before noon on May 20, I received an e-mail from Linda in response to my tweet:

“Hi I saw your ‘tweet’ to me about my daughter’s boyfriend wanting to go into the military.  You were writing me in reference to a tweet I wrote back in April.  My daughter’s e-mail is attached, and the two of you can communicate about it.  Her name is Jo Beth.”

A few emails to Jo Beth eventually led to some phone calls with Alberto, the JROTC superstar with dreams of joining the military.  He mentioned that his girlfriend had explained how we found him and we shared a laugh over this unorthodox way of reporting.

The more my reporting partner and I chatted with Alberto the more interested we became in his story.  Here is a kid who was the top JROTC cadet in the state and all he wants is to serve his country in the military, but he can’t due to his citizenship status.

We pitched his story to our editor and the decision was made: we HAD to talk to this young man.  So we booked our flights to North Carolina.

Next thing we knew we were sitting in Alberto and Jo Beth’s living room with two cameras, a lighting kit and a notebook full of questions.  We emerged a few hours later having squeezed every last detail out of Alberto and feeling very confident about the story.

As we flew home from the East Coast, it was amazing to think that the opportunity to interview Alberto started with a successful search on Twitter.

Celebrities and others have given Twitter a reputation for obnoxious and pointless messages about what someone ate for breakfast, but in terms of connecting with REAL people with REAL stories, it was the perfect tool.

That being said, it’s summer time again in the desert, and I just wrapped up the second semester of my three semester masters program.  I worked the majority of this semester in the New Media Innovation Lab, which takes on tasks from various media clients to think-tank ideas and come up with ideas for solutions to their problems.  I had a lot of fun because I basically got paid to be the geek that I am while getting experience and exposure making website mock-ups, flash utilities and other fun things.

This summer is chock-full of great experiences for me.  I am part of the News21 program, which is a nationally funded program that promotes the creating of unique, innovative multimedia journalism.  Arizona State is one of several “incubator” schools, and our groups is focusing on Latino issues in America.

My partner and I are beginning a story this Monday on Latinos in the military, specifically in regard to service as a path to citizenship. Since it is well funded, the program allows for a lot of traveling, so I will be travelling across the nation gathering sources for our story.

In addition to the News21 program, I am also working as a research intern for the popular social media and web technology blog, ReadWriteWeb.  I just began this week and so far it is going great.  I am assisting with some short term and long term research projects, and I hope to expand my role as the summer evolves.  Who knows, it could turn into a full time position later on.

That should do it for now, just a quick update on me and the coming summer.  I will make a point not to neglect the blog all summer long.  I will likely be inserting posts about the progress of News21, the RWW internship and other big news and ideas I have.  Enjoy the summer!

Lacy has her own blog on BusinessWeek called “Valley Girl”, co-hosts Yahoo’s Tech Ticker, has published a book, is halfway through her second book, and on top of all that now she writes for TechCrunch. Aside from the business stuff, she’s living my dream.

And apparently, she’s living several journalism students’ dreams.

Today, Lacy wrote a terrific and bold article on TechCrunch called “Who the Hell Is Enrolling in Journalism School Right Now?” which caught my eye on my RSS feed and made me think, “uh oh”.

In the article, Lacy says “I’ve gotten farther in ten years than I thought I would in fifty” while a friend of hers who chose journalism school is not even in the industry. She then launches into a powerful affront on why journalism school is a bad idea, including this gem:

“Journalism schools are like foot-binding. They force you into a style that a bunch of dinosaurs all agreed was acceptable a zillion years ago. So in an age of blogging, you have no voice. In fact, if I were in J-school now, I’d have my knuckles rapped for using the rhetorical “you” in those last two sentences.”

If I weren’t on a crowded train at the time, I would have started a slow-clap for Lacy. That paragraph pretty succinctly sums up part of the reason I do not like traditional reporting and why I do not want to find myself in a traditional journalism setting. To close her article, Lacy hits it out the park:

“Journalism isn’t dying; it’s just in a period of extreme volatility. And in any time of volatility, there’s huge room for opportunity. But you’re not going to learn how to exploit it in a stuffy classroom taught by people who got there by working at newspapers.”

The funny thing is a graduate journalism student like myself should be offended by this article, but instead I’m feeling more assured about my position. I do feel the urge, however, to explain that not all journalism schools are alike, and that The Cronkite School is encouraging this non-traditional path as well.

I read this article on my iPhone while riding the train home from journalism grad school and just after, I noticed that Lacy had posted this on her Twitter account:

She of course is referring to her BuisnessWeek article also written today called “AP and News Corp.: Wrong About Google” in which she wags her finger and warns that “asking web companies to pay up for content won’t fix a business model that Old Media should have remedied a long time ago”.

Two amazing articles published within hours of eachother? This girl is my hero for the day. Call me a fan-boy, but she has a hell of a silver tongue:

“The AP’s rant followed News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch telling Forbes that Google should have to start paying for linking to News Corp. content. What’s next? Charging Twitter for the privilege of all those editors and reporters who try to drum up interest in their articles via Tweets? …

Once you’re reduced to legal threats and whining, you’re one step away from admitting total defeat. Just ask the music industry. What’s next, suing our own readers for clicking on Google links?”

I encourage everyone to read both of these articles, because they are flat out amazing. Lacy has written some things that some would hesitate to say, but the truth is a lot of people share her opinions.

Brady regaled the group with stories of when WashingtonPost.com was on its first servers, which were so old you could literally hear them start creaking, causing people to shout “Everybody save!” as a warning to the newsroom.  Today, the technology has advanced, but a lack of open-mindedness to the web has persisted.

Thanks to people like Brady, over 160 reporters at the Washington Post also know how to shoot video to supplement their reporting online, but Brady still feels that multimedia and web content is not at the forefront of reporters minds enough.

“The web is a medium in its own right, not just a platform,” Brady added.

Brady said that he has always “pushed and pushed and pushed” to get the web into reporter’s journalistic thought process, and not just as an afterthought.  Brady said reporters need to be thinking how a story could be interactive or include a database at the story conception stage, not after the story has been written.

Of the hardest tasks to accomplish with online media, Brady puts engaging the readership at the very top.  He mentioned that it was a struggle to convince management to allow for commenting on stories because at that time no one was allowing it.  Because of Brady’s lobbying to create a user community on WashingtonPost.com, the paper became one of the first to allow comments on their stories.

Brady said that building that community of users is key to creating a loyal user base.  He mentions that 80 per cent of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is commoditized, meaning people can read about that story anywhere.  To get users coming back to your site to read it means creating a sense of community for the users.

This ties into the fact that Brady is adamantly opposed to calculating “unique visitors” for site metrics.  Brady is much more concerned with having a strong loyal user base than a huge population of users that come by once a month.

As for the plight of newspapers, Brady offered a unique perspective on big media’s inability to see the coming storm.  The problem, he said, is that the web came around at a time when newspaper execs had never learned to change.  The newspaper business model had worked lucratively for so many years that it wasn’t that they were unwilling to change, it was that they didn’t know how to change.

To wrap up, Brady offered some unique advice to aspiring journalists and media employees.  While previous visitors have advised students to learn as much as possible, Brady said not to overwhelm yourself with too many skills.  He said skills are secondary to having a strong understanding of how media has changed in recent years and how it will change in the years to come.

“Skills are one thing, but you gotta know how things are changing… Some people just don’t get it.”

One feature, which allows users to purchase items from within an application, caught my eye more than the others.  For those unfamiliar with the iPhone, Apple allows iPhone users to purchase applications made by third party developers through the App Store.

Since the conception of the App Store, the interaction between developers and their customers ended once an app was purchased and installed. With iPhone 3.0, developers will be able to sell additional content from within their applications, increasing their potential revenues and encouraging them to upgrade their applications.

Apple used game developers as an example of one community which could potentially benefit from this feature.  A game developer could sell their product in the App Store, but offer additional levels or features to be purchased from within the game.  Ben Parr of Mashable wrote an excellent article today about the importance of this feature to the mobile economy (read it here).  The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.

As a grad student working on my masters in journalism, the current crisis facing newspapers is a topic that is constantly crossing my mind.  For years, newspapers survived heavily on advertisements and classified ads for their revenues, and subscriptions played a much smaller role.  But with the introduction of free online services like Craigslist, the well of cash which classifieds brought to newspapers has all but dried up. Additionally, advertisers are putting more of their money in cheaper, more focused online ads forcing newspapers to brainstorm ideas for paid subscriptions services.

The newspaper industry did little to prepare itself for the oncoming storm of the Internet, and instead chose to ignore the problem.  Now, with revenues plummeting, some are grasping at straws to find ways to survive, while others are either closing their doors (as in the case of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News) or switching to an online-only publication (take for instance the Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

Most newspapers have some sort of online companion to their printed editions, but the majority of their revenues still come from the printed edition.  The problem is, the cost of printing a newspaper is far more expensive than maintaining a website, but until the newspapers can discover how to transfer their revenue from print to online, they are stuck in their downward spiral.

In a recent episode of the MacBreak Weekly podcast, Andy Ihnatko stated that the only way for the newspaper industry to survive on the web was to abandon the web because the web will always and forever be free.  Instead he suggested that newspapers concentrate their digital monetization efforts to mobile devices such as the iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle.

Newspapers have already missed the web wave, and to jump on now is impossible.  As Ihnatko pointed, the web inherently wants to be free, and newspaper survival on the web would seek to break this law.  Besides, why pay to access the New York Times website when there are thousands of other free credible news sources and aggregators?

Instead, newspapers need to see that another wave is coming, and they can choose now to jump on before it overtakes them.  The wave is mobile devices, and with the new iPhone 3.0 in-app purchasing feature, there are now countless possibilities for newspapers to get on-board.

Hypothetically, a newspaper like the New York Times could sell an application for the iPhone which accessed their top stories at a low price of, say, $2.99 (about half the price of a week of print subscription).  Where the Times could turn a profit is offering subscriptions from within the application.  Perhaps a user could subscribe to different sections of the paper, like Politics or Sports for an additional $.99 a month which they could be prompted to renew.  Or the Times could even offer personalized news feeds based on keywords or a user’s interests and browsing habits.  Exclusive content made specifically for the iPhone could also be sold at a premium, and prices could be placed on viewing an entire story versus the first couple paragraphs.

As the nation’s mobile infrastructure expands, the number of people with the need to access the news on their mobile devices will continue to grow.  In 2005, 40% of mobile users in Japan (over 100 million people) used their devices to access news and information services.  This number grew to 52% in 2007, and I would venture a guess to say that nearly two-thirds, if not more, are getting news on their phones today.

The possibilities are out there, and newspapers need to be talking not only with companies like Apple and Amazon to learn how they could profit from their devices, but they also need to be communicating with each other.  Additionally, I think newspapers should be getting the word out to the public about their woes, instead of calling out for help when it is too late.  One day we could wake up and our most beloved papers could be gone, and many may not even know why.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot about how the New York Times has impressively been going open source with its data and opening up various APIs to the public programming community.  Well, if you were thinking this post was going to be another API release… you’re right.  BUT, the Times also has another new exciting announcement.

First of all, the new API: dubbed the NYT Newswire API, this new programming interface will allow instant – yes I do mean instant – access to every New York Times article as it is published.  

“With the Times Newswire API, you can get links and metadata for Times articles as soon as they are published on NYTimes.com. The Times Newswire API provides an up-to-the-minute stream of published items.”

Personally, I’m not a programmer, so I don’t fully appreciate everything these API’s have to offer, but I know the devoloper community is surely excited about the plethora of access points to NYT data.  It will be interesting to see what sorts of applications are created with open access to these keys.

Now for the OTHER New York Times story: a proposed community blog network.  According to a Brooklyn blogger, on Monday the New York Times will begin a network of blogs at the local level:

“Starting next week, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative starting mid-day on Monday… According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’”

Though this has not been confirmed or announced by the Times itself, it doesn’t seem to be too far fetched an idea.  The Times already has several successful blogs of its own and helped fund Wordpress and other web publishing platforms.

When it comes to the future of newspapers, the New York times seems to be doing to most to keep its head above water and to embrace Web technology.  I only hope their well of money doesn’t run dry too soon.