GA county populations | Create Infographics

For Friday's current events discussion

Hi COM 303 editors!

Post your five current events questions as comments to this post. This will give me one-stop shopping to see, organize and think about your questions.

Use either tomorrow's print or online versions of the New York Times.


Deadline: 8 p.m. Thursday, January 12.

USC: Most newspapers dead in 5 years

From the Los Angeles Times:

As if the ink-stained wretches of the newspaper world need anymore bad news, the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future says the print product some of you like to pick up of your driveway every morning will go the way of the dinosaur within five years.
A Digital Future report summarizing 10 years of the Center's studies asks, "Is America at a Digital Turning Point?" and the answer seems to be yes.
On the question of newspapers, Center director Jeffrey I. Cole says:

... We believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium - the largest and the smallest. ... The impending death of the American print newspaper continues to raise many questions. Will media organizations survive and thrive when they move exclusively to online availability? How will the changing delivery of content affect the quality and depth of journalism?

USC concludes: "Most print newspapers will be gone in five years."

Fox News and Infographics: Ships passing in the night

From the Washington Post:

Posted at 02:19 PM ET, 12/14/2011

Fox News graphics errors: full-on scandal By Erik Wemple Mitt Romney has turned black, at least according to a graphic that appeared on a Fox News program today.

Have a look — this is strange even by the standards of this Republican race. That comes on top of the channel’s mislabeling states in its on-screen maps.

Barack Romney?

That comes on top of the channel’s mis-rendering of a chart on unemployment trends, one that casts the economic record of the Obama administration in a less favorable light than facts warrant.

AP Style check for Word

From the AP Stylebook website, http://www.apstylebook.com/?do=product&pid=style-guard: 


AP StyleGuard – the newest addition to the AP Stylebook family

AP StyleGuard, powered by Equiom Linguistic Labs, is a powerful yet easy solution that integrates with Microsoft Word and provides automatic checking of your documents for AP style. Using defined structure and rules similar to Word’s spelling and grammar checking, AP StyleGuard helps ensure the consistency of your writing style. It saves you the time of manually referring to the AP Stylebook and offers recommendations on items you might not have realized are covered by AP style.
No matter what type of writing you do, you can rest assured that AP StyleGuard helps you stay on top of all of the current spelling, grammar, punctuation and usage guidelines from the journalist’s bible.
StyleGuard includes the latest AP Stylebook guidance, with rules updated throughout the year to keep your writing covered by the newest additions and changes responding to news events and the evolution of the language.

Your documents are checked automatically in Microsoft Word and as you type
• Each proposed correction is clearly highlighted in the document and shows you the corresponding AP Stylebook rule, so you always know why something was corrected
• Easy-to-understand features are similar to other proofing tools, including Ignore, Ignore All, Change, Change All, Auto Correct and Add Comment
• Easily install multiple style guides from Equiom, with the ability to turn on/off specific guides, search for specific rules and edit guide rules (with appropriate permissions)
• Additional calculators, tables and real-time data links, such as Web references, help make your writing faster and more accurate
• Operates on Windows XP and higher and on Microsoft Office 2003 and higher; no additional hardware or software is needed (Internet connection is optional) StyleGuard is currently a PC product and is not compatible with Macs.

For complete installation instructions, click here.

From Paul Jones at UNC

Programmers and others working with Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society
have created MediaCloud http://www.mediacloud.org/

MediaCloud, they say, is "a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started below."

Imagining A City Without A Daily Newspaper on NPR

NewsTechzilla's pointer to a story on "Imagining A City Without A Daily Newspaper."

The original story is at NPR.

1981 future-casting report on the news

San Francisco TV station's 1981 report on the future of news distribution, on YouTube.

The comments to the video also are interesting.

Web Traffic To Top 10 Online Newspapers Grows 16% Year-Over-Year In December

Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today reported a 16
percent year-over-year increase in unique visitors to the top 10
newspaper Web sites, growing from 34.6 million unique visitors in
December 2007 to 40.1 million in December 2008. NYTimes.com was the
number one online newspaper destination in December 2008, with 18.2
million unique visitors. USATODAY.com and washingtonpost.com took the
No. 2 and No. 3 spots, with 11.4 million and 9.5 million unique
visitors, respectively.

Full News Release and Tables:
http://www.nielsen.com/media/2009/pr_090127_download.pdf