The Atlantic, a purveyor of high-tone, long-form, magazine-type literature, is launching a new division for e-books.

Called, ever so colorfully, “The Atlantic Books,” the new product line will include nonfiction reads between 10,000 words and 30,000 words and will first be featured as the Kindle Singles. Later, the e-books will also be made available elsewhere.

In addition to original pieces created solely for this new endeavor, The Atlantic Books will also include hand-picked classic selections from The Atlantic‘s vast catalog of journalism, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction.

“The launch of The Atlantic Books reflects our commitment to innovation in publishing in the service of great journalism and storytelling,” said The Atlantic president M. Scott Havens in a statement on the news.

Just last month, the media company announced a partnership with Longreads, a web startup focusing on, duh, longer-form online content.

As other print publications struggle to maintain great, expensive content in an age of changing economics and reader habits, it’s heartening to watch an older institution gamely try new things.

The Atlantic was founded in 1857 in Boston as a literal and cultural commentary magazine. Its long list of luminary founders includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In 2009, the publishers launched The Atlantic Wire, a website to aggregate opinion, editorial, and news from a wide range of reputable sources.

A Dutch journalist named Rob Wijnberg has raised $1.3 million to launch a digital news site called De Correspondent that will focuses on context and quality content, rather than the hustle of the breaking news cycle. He pitched the project on Dutch national television in mid-March and in just over a week, achieved his goal of 15,000 subscribers and raised over a million dollars through crowdfunding.

Wijnberg formerly served as editor in chief of a daily newspaper called NRC Next the targeted young adults. Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Wijnberg, who said he will work with individual correspondents who determine the news agenda based on what they think is important and relevant, rather than breaking news. His translated, ten-item manifesto reads:

• Daily, but beyond the issues of the day.
• From news to new
• No political ideology, but journalistic ideals
• Themes and interconnections
• Journalism over revenues
• From readers to participants
• No advertisers, but partners
• No target groups, but kindred spirits
• Ambitious in ideals, modest about wisdom
• Fully digital

This sounds a lot like Twitter founder Ev William’s current endeavor Medium, which he founded to address some of the pitfalls he saw in online journalism.

“It’s not too late to rethink how online publishing works and build a system optimized for quality, rather than popularity,” he said in a blog post.  ”Where anyone can have a voice but where one has to earn the right to your attention. A system where people work together to make a difference, rather than merely compete for validation and recognition. A world where thought and craftsmanship is rewarded more than knee-jerk reactions.”

Before starting De Correspondent, Wijnberg wrote a book about the current state of news media where he said ” “I don’t believe in ‘the news’ in the objective sense of the word. You can describe the world in infinite ways, and ‘the news’ happens to be one of them.”

The publication is still in its nascent form and it is unclear what it will look like. However, a community of more than 17,000 people are willing to pay 60 euros a year to this type of digital journalism. While the Internet has powerful abilities of breaking and distributing news, digital publications from San Francisco to Amsterdam have struggled to find stay on top of the constant churn, while also keeping readers informed, and building successful business models. At least in the Netherlands, they have space cake.

Photo Credit: Screenshot

The Associated Press won a battle in its long-running war against Internet copycats. A U.S. federal court has backed the AP and the New York Times in a case against Norway’s Meltwater, a company that “scraped” news from the content owners without paying for it.

Meltwater argued that its scraping was “fair use” under copyright law, where a user may reuse content. The case sets up a debate over fair use, content ownership rights, and free speech. The outcome of this battle will be interesting, as nobody who creates original content likes scrapers, but everybody likes free speech.

Here’s the ruling.

Meltwater monitors the Internet for news about its clients, who pay thousands of dollars a year to receive news alerts and to access Meltwater’s database. It sends alerts in the form of newsletters, with the first couple of sentences of the story and its headlines. The AP wanted Meltwater to buy a license to distribute story excerpts. When the service refused, AP sued for copyright violation.

Meltwater argued that its reproductions were akin to a search engine, where it’s OK for Google to show headlines and the top lines of text in its search results. The Electronic Frontier Foundation supported that argument. But the New York Times backed the AP, saying that Meltwater was just stealing content.

U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote ruled in favor of the AP. The judge didn’t accept the argument that Meltwater itself was like a search engine and said Meltwater was more like a business rival for the AP. While Google News users click through on 56 percent of excerpted stories, only 0.08 percent did so for Meltwater.

Then what’s OK? Apparently you can cite a headline, but not the entire “lede” of a story.

The newspaper will begin charging frequent users of its site this summer. People who read more than 20 articles a month on the Post site will have to pay a fee, although the content will still be free for print subscribers; people using computers at schools, government offices, and military buildings; and those who connect to the Post through another site’s referral.

“News consumers are savvy; they understand the high cost of a top-quality news gathering operation and the importance of maintaining the kind of in-depth reporting for which the Post is known,” said Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post, in a statement. “Our digital package is a valuable one, and we are going to ask our readers to pay for it and help support our news gathering as they have done for many years with the print edition.”

In the battle to save print journalism and the storied institutions behind it, publishers like The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times implemented subscription plans a few years back. Print publications were leaking revenue as people increasingly turned to the free Internet for their news consumption, but newspapers were worried that if they charged for digital content, readers and advertisers would also abandon ship. (Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?)

The Washington Post resisted charging for its digital content for a long time. CEO and Chairman Don Graham has garnered a reputation for valuing journalistic quality and ethics over profits, but despite good intentions, circulation and revenue are and have been dropping significantly. Warren Buffett is one of the Post’s most influential and loyal shareholders, and he and Graham disagreed over how to keep the Post afloat.

“Newspapers have been giving away their product at the same time they’re selling it, and that is not a great business model,” Buffet said on CNBC last year. “So when they put papers up on the Internet and you get it free, you’re competing with yourself. … And you’re seeing throughout the industry a reaction to that problem and an answer to it. You shouldn’t be giving away a product that you’re trying to sell.”

The paywall is experimental at this point, and the Post could alter it depending on response from readers, subscribers, and digital advertisers. One of the issues is that the Post’s online readership is national, whereas the print subscribers are primarily local. Along with these baby steps toward a digital business strategy, the Post is also planning to release an iPad app.

In a report on the State of the News Media, the Pew Research Center found that news reporting resources continue to shrink, which negatively influences the quality of the content.

“This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands,” the report said. “At the same time, newsmakers and others with information they want to put into the public arena have become more adept at using digital technology and social media to do so on their own, without any filter by the traditional media.  They are also seeing more success in getting their message into the traditional media narrative.”  

It is a tricky, tangled situation to be sure and one that requires a complicated balancing act of the need keep the flow of information accessible, while also making money, and the need to scale back on resources without scaling back on quality. In warfare, a wall with holes in it is not the most effective of methods (I know, I read A Game of Thrones), but only time will tell if this can or will work with journalism.

Google won’t have to pay German news publishers to show short snippets of news, thanks to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s parliamentary coalition. But the law doesn’t specify how long those snippets can be. And the publishers association is also claiming victory, saying that the new legislation allows them to decide how Google — and others — can use their content.

In other words, Germany has replaced a complete mess with an entirely new complete mess. Which is perfectly reflected in the news coverage:

Bloomberg reports that “Google defeats publishers over web copyright in German vote.” GigaOm reports that “German parliament passes ‘Google tax’ law, forcing royalty payments for news snippets.

Which means no one has a clue.

The good part for Google is that the new law says aggregators can display “single words or very small text excerpts” without paying royalties. The good part for German publishers — according to the publishers — is that they get to choose whether and how aggregators use their content:

An automatic right of use is not associated with the approved scheme. Rather, it is open to publishers to make the business decision that they agree with search engines and aggregators who wish to use the content for commercial publishing.

[This] gives the publishers a fair policy instrument with which to make decisions on the commercial use of their content by search engines and aggregators themselves. This is a real signal of parliament, which underscores the value of a free press and journalistic content.

The worst part of the new law would seem to be the fact that the bill does not define what “very small text excerpts” are. Is that five words? Ten? The first paragraph? The phrase is completely open to interpretation, and putting “single words” just before it only makes them trend to really, really, really small. A quick check of Google News reveals that an average snippet on the site right now seems to be in the 20-  to 30-word range.

Does that count? Will a judge in a new case brought a few months from now agree that 20-30 words is “very small?”

All of which means that the short version of this article is: Google and news publishers in Germany are going to have more problems before this all gets figured out, and this recent legislation was a complete waste of time.

photo credit: dullhunk via photopin cc

It’s one thing to be a company man. Or to toe the company line, parrot the company’s talking points, and be a staunch defender of your team. It’s another to be a bloody idiot and refuse even to acknowledge the rest of the world exists.

Like BlackBerry exec Stephen Bates in a chat with the BBC today.

But the BBC interviewer pursues him doggedly, magnificently, patiently, and wonderfully — at least for us. It’s embarrassing, to say the least, for BlackBerry corporately, and for Bates personally. Here’s the interview (transcript below):

BBC interviewer: What have you learned from Apple?

So BlackBerry is a unique proposition. We’ve got round about 17-18 million customers who love the BlackBerry experience, so we’re taking the essence of that BlackBerry experience and moving it forward.”

BBC interviewer: Have you learned anything from the iPhone?

And … this … market is a great market. There’s a, there’s a change …

BBC interviewer: I’m just wondering, technologically, it’s a pretty straight question, have you?

So, so, so, we … BlackBerry was one of the inventors of the smartphone market. You know, we’ve helped shape what the smartphone market is today, and we’re at the bridge of a new transformation where we see it going from mobile communications to this mobile computing world. And we saw that with our existing BlackBerrys that that would not give us the power to drive this new market.

BBC interviewer: OK, but obviously the iPhone is your main competitor. You all learn from each other. What have you learned from the iPhone?

So, so, the key focus around BlackBerry 10 that we’ve really driven to is to deliver a new unique user experience.

BBC interviewer: So you haven’t learned anything from the iPhone, you’re saying?

So, fun-fundamentally…

BBC interviewer: The new user experience? Sounds a little like you’re reading from a press release. I’m just wondering, you all learn from each other, you say ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’ And one of the things about the iPhone, which has its faults — they all have their faults — is that it’s very incredibly user-friendly and you can bounce around it and it’s, it’s … so what have you learned from it?

So, so, so, we’ve spent the last few months with BlackBerry 10 engaging our customers, our consumer customers, our business customers, the developers, our partners, and we’ve been interacting about what the new BlackBerry 10 will deliver …

BBC interviewer: OK, you’re clearly not answering that question …

. . .

At this point the Beeb journalist basically gives up trying to get Bates to answer that question and goes on to other topics. You have to love the British, who seem to know how to do mean better, and more politely, than anyone else. Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan come to mind.

It’s a massive fail for BlackBerry, as this has made the news on multiple sites on the same day of BlackBerry’s big new launch. I don’t blame the exec — he was almost certainly coached by PR reps to not mention competitors and keep the focus on BlackBerry — but memo to PR agencies: People do better when they speak naturally.

Let the man have a conversation.

His points — and BlackBerry’s — are much stronger when he acknowledges that maybe, just maybe, there are good mobile products in the universe that did not originate with a company formerly known as Research in Motion.

photo credit: Peter Werkman (www.peterwerkman.nl) via photopin cc

The Knight Foundation supports “transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities, and foster the arts.” In 2007, the foundation launched the Knight News Challenge to promote the next generation of media innovation. The challenge occurred three times in 2012, with the first two challenges themed around networks and data.

Winners receive a share of $5 million and support from the Knight Foundation’s extensive network of influential people and advisors. Today, it awarded eight mobile media ventures a total of $2.4 million.

“In 2013 the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices is expected to be greater than the number of computers for the first time,” said Michael Maness, VP for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation.  “These eight Knight News Challenge projects, and the innovators behind them, are helping to stretch the ways people around the world are engaging with information and using it to shape their communities.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is one of the recipients, nabbing $600,000 to make it easier for people in developing counties to access its content. In addition to Wikipedia, the winners include:

• Witness: Helping newsrooms authenticate the deluge of photos and videos emerging from news events by creating an app that automatically stamps the content with identifying information, including the location where it was taken. The project is lead by the human rights organization Witness in partnership with The Guardian Project.

• Digital Democracy: Enabling residents of the Peruvian Amazon to document the effects of mining and oil drilling by creating a mobile tool kit they can use to collect and share data.

• RootIO: Piloting software that will connect basic mobile phones with a transmitter to turn them into micro community radio stations. The effort is being tested in Uganda.

• Abayima: Creating an app that turns a SIM card into a storage device for news and information. The app will be particularly useful in crisis situations, enabling journalists and others to safely transfer information when communication networks are compromised or disabled.

• Textizen: Expanding the ways governments can collect citizen input by enabling it through text. Piloted through Code for America, Textizen works by placing survey questions in physical places like parks and bus stops where residents will encounter them and can text in their opinion.

• TKOH: Creating a more natural tool for recording oral histories with an app that prompts people to tell stories when they see pre-selected photos or videos.

• Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation: Connecting small farmers in developing countries with advice and feedback via a platform through which they can ask questions and have them quickly answered by farmers in other communities. In the pilot, a Kenyan farmer received advice on frost control and tips on raising rabbits.

Over the course of the past six years, the Knight Foundation has put more than $32 million into funding 88 projects. In December, it partnered with San Francisco’s public media station KQED and the Public Radio Exchange to launch media accelerator program Matter Ventures.

Matter Ventures launched an accelerator program today for entrepreneurs that are making society more informed, connected, and empowered. The program is run in conjunction with founding partners KQED, the public television and radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area, the journalism nonprofit the Knight Foundation, and the Public Radio Exchange, in an effort to revolutionize the media industry.

It is a “media accelerator,” but media is a multiheaded beast encompassing communication, art, news, advertising, social networking, and the technology that delivers all of this content to an audience. Rather than attempting to tame or define the beast, Matter Ventures is taking a “blank slate approach.” It will support startups that align with its core values while also leveraging existing technology and sustainable business models.

“Media has been called the connective tissue of society,” said CEO Corey Ford in an interview. “It is hard to define these days, and we are need-focused and solution-agnostic. We are interested in startups that take emerging behaviors of how people connect and consume media, and design products specifically for them. There is a wide possibility for what these ventures could be.”

Before spearheading Matter Ventures, Ford ran Runway, the “venture creation” program within Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Runway provided a supportive environment for entrepreneurs to take an idea from scratch, explore the possibilities, and build a successful company. Ford started out in journalism as a producer for PBS’s Frontline and then attended Stanford Business School where he became interested in the intersection between media, technology, and entrepreneurship.

“I realized that the world was changing dramatically and we weren’t changing with it,” he said. “Entrepreneurs have a big opportunity right now to define the future, and the next generation of meaningful media institutions. The best ideas are going to be the ones we couldn’t have predicted.”

Participating companies can offer any product within the media vertical, whether it be a participatory platform, content production engine, or business-to-business service. The most important consideration is whether the team will have a positive impact on the media industry and be responsive to the market. Ford said it is important for entrepreneurs to acknowledge the importance of mobile, as well as the widespread popularity of social-local platforms, crowd funding, and online communities.

Matter Ventures is backed by a $2.5 million fund, pooled together by KQED and the Knight Foundation, each investing $1.25 million. The fund will support four classes of five startups over the course of two years. Applications for the first class are due on Jan. 6, and entrants into the program will receive $50,000, workspace, and go through an intensive, four-month “design thinking and entrepreneurship bootcamp” consisting of workshops, mentorship sessions, and reviews.

Information sessions for interested applicants will be held at 6 p.m. on Dec. 13, Dec. 20, and Jan. 3 at Matter Ventures’ headquarters at 421 Bryant Street in San Francisco.

YouTube has become a massive news destination, YouTube chief executive Salar Kamangar said in his acceptance speech, with 7,000 hours of news-related footage uploaded every single day. Fully a third of searches on YouTube are news-related, and after the March earthquake in Japan this year, the top 20 YouTube videos of the disaster were watched almost 100 million times.

Appropriately or not, the award comes just a day before Israel published a video on YouTube showing the killing of Ahmed Jabari, a Hamas military leader, by missile.

That’s news at its most raw, and given that it was presented by one of the participants in the event not by a theoretically neutral party, it might showcase better than anything else the changing face of news in a connected digital world.

YouTube is also moving into live-streaming more than ever before, live-streaming the recent U.S. elections, for example, to 24 million people in 215 countries around the globe.

Here’s Kamangar’s acceptance speech.

Note to YouTube PR: Drop the silly cat and dog puppets next time.

photo credit: Viktor Hertz via photopin cc

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people consume content, as well as the way writers and editors create it. Today, Contextly has emerged from stealth mode to change the way digital journalists provide context in their stories.

Contextly was founded by Ryan Singel, a veteran journalist who cofounded the Threat Level blog at Wired. After a decade as a writer and editor, Singel is leaving to run Contextly full time. The guiding principal behind the company is the belief that context is everything, and the tools available to reporters are inadequate.

Contextly offers a plugin for WordPress that makes it easier for writers to include related links. Right now, connecting to other articles involves search engine queries, multiple tabs, and copying and pasting. These steps make telling a full story more time-consuming and frustrating than it should be. However, telling the full story is necessary not only to engage readers, but also to relay the news with as much truth and value as possible.

“Readers crave context in news, even as a reporter’s job of putting the day’s story into a larger picture is hard to do when speed is essential and the news cycle never stops.” Singel said in a blog post announcing his departure. “But writers — good ones — know that the day’s work is just part of a long-­term story that they and their co­workers have been telling for years.”

Online journalism has been descried as a step down from print publications, where information had to be verified by two credible sources and every article was fact-checked. However, one of the benefits of consuming news online is that readers can track down the truth for themselves and find background information and alternative perspectives. It also puts a massive store of knowledge at the disposal of reporters who can use it to inform their writing.

“Writers like related links because they make them feel like they are not just putting out yet another story that feeds the Internet beast, but that they are telling a larger story,” Singel said during an interview with VentureBeat. Those links are more important than people give them credit for. If you are reading something in a newspaper, it is not easy to go find out more information. Links can help readers discover new content, learn more about topics that interest them, and verify original sources.”

While building Contextly, Singel approached the design from an editorial perspective. He said writers have a deep institutional knowledge and need an efficient way to express it and tell a more connected tale. The widget “marries editorial control with serendipity,” and according to early beta testing on Wired, Contextly increases page views, as well as time-on-site. 

There is also a data analytics component. The engine gathers data on site visitors and produces readable reports that writers and publishers can use to inform their work. Use cases range from large online publications like Wired to individual bloggers to companies that are using their blogs to engage customers. As with any form of digital media, more traffic means more revenue.

“There is so much going on in online journalism,” Singel said. “There is so much experimentation and so much demand on writers. What we are hoping to do is make writers’ and publishers’ lives easier and more profitable, as well as explore fun new things. The online journalism world hasn’t totally figured out what the business model is and what readers want, and hopefully we will play a good part in figuring that out.”

Down the road, Contextly will release a series of other tools for digital publishing, but right now, Singel and his team are focused on related links. Monday will be Singel’s first day as a full-time entrepreneur in over 10 years, and while he expressed sadness about stepping out of the daily news cycle, he said he’s looking forward to the journey ahead. Read his full blog post here.

Circa has released a new mobile app for news. And — hallelujah — it is most definitely not just another copycat attempt to cash in on the path that Flipboard and Pulse paved.

With cofounder Ben Huh of Cheezburger fame, Circa chief executive Matt Galligan is attempting to reframe what news is and how news is consumed when delivered via mobile channels. And no, in spite of the competition, he doesn’t see that space as crowded right now.

“Flipboard and Pulse are great ways to aggregate existing articles, but the content is the same,” Galligan told me this morning while dealing with a little failure-to-launch crisis (Apple’s app store didn’t release the app at the expected time). “The best way to deliver news is to tailor the news to the device is to make it not just prettier but actually different content.”

Source: iTunes

A Circa news story.

So Circa built a new kind of content management system, hired 12 editors, and redefined news.

Instead of a story or an article, like this one, Circa news is a collection of points: key details. Instead of one post that tells you everything you need or want to know, Circa points back to its sources so you can easily seek more information. And instead of a static one-off story, Circa follows the news for you, if you choose, alerting you when new details come to light.

In other words, it’s context, not just content.

“You can follow breaking news or stories that take place over time,” says Galligan. “So for instance, about that Air France flight that went down a few years ago, they very recently found the plane’s black box. If you happened to be interested in that event, you would have to kind of be lucky to see that latest development to know about it … you have to stay very engaged.”

But people, he argues, shouldn’t need to have to remember to check up on previous stories. Instead, he argues, it’s the job of journalism to send the news updates, to keep users informed on not just categories of events, but actual events.

That’s new, and that’s significant.

It’s likely we’ve all experienced this scenario: You’re interested in a story but never quite hear the end. You read about the survivor of a crash, but not how they’re doing years later. Or you see news about the stock scandal, but not whether anyone actually gets hauled into court.

Circa, if it works, could fix that.

Circa-style news will be a little Sergeant Friday-style: Just the facts, ma’am. And there will be no original reporting. But the point, Galligan says, is to drive people to the full story.

“It’s not original information but it is original content,” he says. “Trust is important to use … on a point-by-point basis we cite our sources, and while we may be the brief for someone, they can read the full articles.”

Circa has been in development for about a year and has raised $900,000 in funding. It’s Galligan’s third company — he most recently cofounded SimpleGeo, which was acquired by Urban Airship.

Oh and, in the spirit of updating the news: While I was writing this story, Circa went live on the app store. Knock yourself out.

photo credit: Zarko Drincic via photopin cc

This is an experiment, and it’s probably less of a risk than it might look. Reporting has always been central to VentureBeat’s approach. In fact, a huge number of our stories on any given day already include original reporting. Our reporters call sources, check facts, and get quotes for a large proportion of our stories.

But like most other tech news sites, we also report on stories that other sites have covered, sometimes without adding reporting of our own. We figure there are stories you want to know about and which we can add some perspective on, even if we haven’t done the footwork ourselves. The trouble is that sometimes it’s hard to find the reported stories, so you, the reader, don’t necessarily know what’s original to us.

Today, we’re going to refrain from doing that. Every story in our news feed today will include reporting we’ve done ourselves.

That doesn’t mean every story here today will be a not-previously-reported, totally-new-to-the-world scoop. (Though I hope many of them are!) What it does mean is that if we publish a story here, you can trust that we’ve done some footwork, we’ve picked up the phone and sent emails, we’ve talked to people, and we’re not just rephrasing and analyzing someone else’s blog post.

If you’ve got a story you think we should report on, as always, let us know.

And please let me know what you think of our experiment.

Update: We took photos. We broke news. We talked to people — including some very sad ones. And we published a couple of interviews, in-depth conference reports, and fun features you won’t find anywhere else. As of 5pm Pacific, we’ve published almost exactly the same number of posts as we do on any other Friday, and our traffic is up.

On any given day, we publish between 35 and 50 posts. The vast majority are reported, tracked back to their sources and confirmed. When we can’t get confirmation, we’re clear about it. Every day of the week.

I sit in a weird spot: although many consider me to be press, I also talk to a lot of other media outlets. I’m often quoted in national newspapers and magazines and regularly appear on TV. This happens partly because I have something interesting to stay; it’s also partly because I treat people how I like to be treated.

Here are my top tips for dealing with the press (including me):

1. Learn about the news outlet and the specific person you’re approaching. Every outlet has a specific feel and each person with an outlet has their own coverage area, interests, and motivations. Read their stuff and figure it out. Nothing will fall flatter than a bulk email sent to every “tips@” account that begins “Dear reporter.” Learn what each person values. In my case, I don’t really care that much about being first on a story. I add the most value when I do deep analysis. I’m a data and numbers guy; if you have those, I’m more likely to dig in.
2. Build relationships before you need them. This is similar to the career advice people get for networking. Follow the people you’re interested in on Twitter. If they tweet something where you can help, offer it. Even if it doesn’t relate to what you do. Offer them access to your network if you know someone who can answer a question.
3. Maintain relationships after you have them. Keep in touch with people on an ongoing basis. I don’t mean daily or weekly, but keep in touch as appropriate.
4. Be fast. Reporters are often on tight deadlines. And in the blog world, a lot of people value being first. The faster you return a call or email, the more likely it is that you’ll be included in the story.
5. Be brief. Get to the point. Your pitch shouldn’t ramble on for pages.
6. Be interesting. If you speak in PRese, it’s a lot less interesting. Avoid cliches like “We’re the leading…” Everyone claims to be the leader — except the real leaders. When I’m preparing for an interview, I’ll come up with two or three lines that are interesting, sharp, and brief to make it easier to quote.
7. Be patient. Depending on the story, somebody might run a piece weeks or months after they talk to you. (I often do this.) In the meantime, it’s OK to follow up periodically if there were updates to what you said or things that the reporter should be aware of. I once did a taped segment for Bloomberg that didn’t air until weeks later. Better reporters will let you know after they use something if there’s been a long delay. (Emily did.)
8. Don’t expect too much. Just because you spent 30 minutes on the phone with a reporter doesn’t mean they’ll use what you said. Sometimes the news changes and the story isn’t relevant anymore; in other cases, they found other people to quote. That’s just part of the news business. I do quite a few interviews where I don’t get quoted — but it goes back to building relationships. I genuinely want to help people tell better stories.
9. Realize that journalists talk to each other. Although we compete, we also chat with each other. If you’re an ass to someone, it will get around.
10. Engage with your critics. This is a controversial one, but I wholeheartedly believe this. I regularly write about two companies in the same space and I’m extremely critical of both. One refuses to talk to me; the other responds within minutes. The second one gets to tell its side of the story and influence my opinion. Both the company and the reading public are better served by having the conversation. The company gets better coverage — not because there is a quid pro quo, but because the dialogue leads to better analysis. And because most of the people who cover the space talk to me (see #9), it helps their overall coverage.
11. Never, ever lie. In order of preference, I want: True, technically true, or no comment. The best PR folks never lie. (And the best management teams don’t lie to their PR folks.) If you lie to me and I find out, it creates another story. It also means I won’t ever trust anything you say again. See also, #9.

A journalist’s job is to bring interesting and informative stories to readers, not to promote your company. If you help them do their job, you’ll do much better at your job.

This post originally appeared on Rocky Agrawal’s blog. It is republished here with his permission.

Top photo: Picsfive/Shutterstock

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social, and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

The tech business deserves a better press corps.

By “better,” I don’t mean “friendlier.” I mean journalists and bloggers that treat technology with the same serious and critical eye that is (or should be) afforded to presidential candidates and Fortune 500 companies.

The tech industry and the entrepreneurs behind it are busy rebuilding our world, in profound and often unanticipated ways. The impact of the technologies we use today will have far-reaching consequences. Google, Facebook, and Apple are massive profit-making (and job-creating) businesses, but they’re also changing the way we live our lives, interact with each other, express ourselves, and think about the world.

Just try to remember life before Google, or (if you’re a bit older) life before email. Or mobile technology: Seemingly overnight, we’ve all been given pocket oracles that can guide us to any destination, keep us in touch with all of our friends, and answer any question we may have. It’s no surprise that people on the streets of the city or in subway cars are all hunched over, staring at little blue squares of light, where before they were reading books, window shopping, or staring vacantly into the middle distance.

You can’t cover those changes adequately just by being a cheerleader for the tech industry or for entrepreneurs. But you also can’t do justice to those stories if you don’t, on some level, appreciate how earthshaking these changes are, and how much creativity and opportunity is being unlocked through tech innovation and entrepreneurship. In other words, you need a combination of enthusiasm and skepticism.

Most of all, you need some principles.

There’s a reason the public holds journalists in only slightly higher esteem than bankers. Over the past decade, we haven’t had a very good track record at sticking to our principles of seeking the truth, and reporting it.

Weapons of mass destruction? Made up, and newspapers published tenuous pretexts for war almost as quickly as the White House came up with them. The mortgage crisis? Foreseeable, but somehow almost every major business reporter missed it. Climate change? Yeah, journalists were still trying to give both sides of that “debate” equal time for a long time after the science was settled beyond a reasonable doubt.

In tech journalism, many of us jumped way too enthusiastically onto the dot-com bandwagon, only to watch it evaporate like a summer daydream.

But more recently, we’ve done better. For example, it’s worth holding Apple accountable for allowing iOS apps to upload users’ address books without letting users know they’re doing it, as VentureBeat and other tech blogs have done. Staying on top of Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policies has also been a worthy endeavor, especially now that the service has over 845 million users and reaches into many corners of the web with its buttons and badges (including on this site).

And it’s also worth reporting when and how the IPO market doesn’t serve the interests of ordinary investors. Applying critical analysis to much-hyped public offerings, like those of Groupon, Zynga, and Yelp, is something tech journalists can and should do.

For VentureBeat’s part, we’re trying to avoid conflicts of interest while providing fact-driven news, intelligent commentary, and informed context with every story. Our approach is laid out in VentureBeat’s public ethics statement. No, we’re not perfect, but we make an effort to talk to sources, verify facts, and provide honest, informed context whenever possible. And if we make mistakes, we correct them.

Most of us journalists don’t match the purity embodied by legendary New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, who won’t accept so much as a drink of water during the events he covers, much less a few million dollars of seed funding. But that’s a model worth aspiring to.

Photo credit: Shutterstock/Tobias Naumann

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“Right now our users are spread across Twitter, our website, Instapaper, Readability, and Kindle. The idea behind the app is to help people avoid finding our link on Twitter, following it to the website and then saving the story to Readability. They can do all that just by opening the app,” said Lammer.

The company is still mostly the two co-founders, Lammer and Max Linsky. They built the app with the help of a developer in D.C. and have expanded their editorial staff to a core group of about a half dozen. “We’re profitable now, thanks to ads and sponsorship on the website,” said Lammer. “The last few months have seen around 66% growth in our traffic.”

So far the startup has maintained good relationships with the publishers it relies on for reading material. The iPad app automatically takes users to the publishers web page first, meaning they get all the benefits of a page view for their advertisers. A simple toggle strips those out using the Readability API. “Right now, all we’re focused on is creating the best reading experience possible. But it’s important to us that the app is a great opportunity for publishers, too, and we’re totally up to work with them to make sure their own advertising is effective within Longform,” said Linksy by email.

For now the company isn’t interested in trying to accelerate its organic growth. “We talked to a bunch of venture capitalists and they had some ideas for how we could proceed that they might fund. But what we’re doing right now, that’s kind of exactly the thing we want to do,” said Lammer.

VentureBeat is proud to announce the two newest members of our writing staff: Meghan Kelly and Chikodi Chima.

Meghan joins our team after a stellar four-month internship in our San Francisco office, where she helped cover new funding announcements as well as write up news about Demo alumni. A new reporter, Meghan has absorbed VentureBeat’s ethic of aggressive, fact-driven reporting and speed. After doing the job of a reporter for several months, it was an easy decision to promote her into that job officially.

Meghan is a southern belle from Yonkers, New York. She’s a graduate of George Washington University, and is the caretaker of VentureBeat’s office cactus, aka PlantBeat.

At VentureBeat, she’ll be covering startups, security and “telling the story of awesome from coast-to-coast.” She’s interested in learning more about how people’s brains tick in relation to the things (and companies) they’ve created. Follow her on Twitter @meghankel, or email her at meghan.kelly@venturebeat.com.

Chikodi comes to VentureBeat after a stint at The Next Web. He’s also contributed to a green tech news startup, helped out with TED India, traveled to Brazil (from where he first wrote a freelance piece for VentureBeat), and is involved in the production of a documentary film.

Chikodi is a multitalented multimedia reporter (check out his short video on beards in Philadelphia), and impressed us with his eagerness to cover Silicon Valley and startup culture.

He’ll cover emerging technologies, startups, investing, cleantech and online communities for VentureBeat. He once hitchhiked from San Francisco to Seattle, and has sold alarm systems for a living.

He received his M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a concentration in digital media. Follow him on Twitter @chikodi or email him at chikodi@venturebeat.com.

We’re not done hiring yet, either. We’re looking for talented reporters in San Francisco and New York. And we’ll be looking for a new intern, too, since we just promoted ours. We need someone hungry to break the news, eager to find needles in haystacks of emails and financial reports, and willing to learn the ropes at a fast-paced, fact-based news startup. Is that you? Write to us.

A lot has changed since I first made it to Silicon Valley a little more than a year ago.

But one thing has remained constant: the ruthless competition for discovering and reporting the best news stories. Among those competitors is TechCrunch, one of the most efficient and tenacious tech news publications in the valley.

Michael Arrington stands — or, stood, rather — at the center of that team. His personality and potential conflicts of interest have generated a lot of discussion. I’m not going to comment in on either of those observations, because I’ve only personally experienced one of his sides in my short time here: He is a ruthless, relentless reporter, regardless of the environment.

Watching Arrington on stage at the company’s yearly conference in San Francisco, TechCrunch Disrupt, is like watching a boxing match. He’s constantly on the offensive and trying to get his speakers to admit to something. Some get away unscathed, but others will inevitably cave to his pressure — such as Digg founder Kevin Rose disclosing his sale of shares in micro-blogging site Twitter. I almost take it for granted that any event where Arrington takes the stage will generate some news.

On Thursday, Arrington left the tech news publication he founded in 2005. It put a bit of a damper on the whole show, and nowhere was that more apparent than the TechCrunch team itself. The news was all over their faces, and you can see it in some of the photos from the show. (Pictured on the right are TechCrunch writers MG Siegler and Alexia Tsotsis.)

“TechCrunch has to start a chapter of its new life, and that’s a life without its founder Michael Arrington,” TechCrunch chief executive Heather Harde said on stage at the show. “TechCrunch, like most startups, has really been operating like a closely knit family, the loss we feel is great, even as we embrace Erick (Schonfeld) as our new editorial lead.”

Disrupt was born from the same philosophy that TechCrunch and Arrington always embodied: Find the most disruptive companies in the valley (and soon the world) and tell the rest of the public about it. While Silicon Valley always seemed like the birthplace of disruption, there were an astounding number of international companies present at this year’s Disrupt.

And they were all there to see Arrington and the team that he’s able to assemble. It was quite the star-studded cast: Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Marissa Mayer, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, April Underwood… the list keeps going on. That doesn’t even count the ridiculous number of investors present at the show. Even an outsider like myself can appreciate the incredible force Arrington was able to gather at this year’s show.

It’s already hard to imagine both TechCrunch and its yearly Disrupt show without Arrington.

“We all need to appreciate what, exactly, Arrington has done here today and in his five years at TechCrunch,” super-angel investor Ron Conway said. “He has really set the bar for everyone.”

Arrington has gone on to start an early-stage $20 million investment fund called the CrunchFund. It was a natural evolution for Arrington to take, seeing as he was already an angel investor.

However, it was the breaking point for Arrington as a blogger. Starting CrunchFund was the move that made Arrington too conflicted to be a credible reporter any more, no matter how aggressively he pursued the facts or disclosed his investments.

Granted, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong didn’t help things with his ham-handed approach to manning publicity for the CrunchFund, for which AOL is a large investor in (and said to be the majority investor). Armstrong confused matters and outraged TechCrunch’s other writers by saying that TechCrunch was “an exception to the rules.”

Except there are no rules in journalism. There are directives: Be aggressive, be tenacious and report the facts. The reader will decide to which level you achieved all those goals. Any conflict of interest ends up eroding the notion of reporting a “fact” because it raises questions about whether facts are omitted or presented in a different light. That’s a choice the readers make, it’s not a directive the chief executive of a fading media company can shape.

But eventually something had to give — there was no way Arrington could remain at TechCrunch while running the CrunchFund. It doesn’t take a philosopher to see the incredible ethical nightmares that lie ahead for the publication had he continued to write about companies he may or may not have chosen to invest in. Arrington, perhaps, said it best himself when he said: “It’s no longer a good situation for me to stay at TechCrunch.”

That much was obvious.

Arrington has raised many questions about the future of ethical journalism. But he was an integral part in re-making and shaping the coverage of Silicon Valley and, if the buzz at Disrupt this year was any indication, was a net positive force for entrepreneurs in the valley. Give him credit for that much.

So, Michael, as a new reporter just a year out of college and still Silicon Valley semi-outsider, I tip my hat to you.

To the TechCrunch staff and every other journalist still out here on this side of the ethical line: keep fighting the good fight.

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Keighley’s story will be available to readers as a $1.99 app for the Apple iPad. It will be an interesting test for journalists who have a long story to tell on a hot topic — Portal 2 is one of the biggest video games of the year and launched on Tuesday — but don’t quite have enough material to make it into a book. And if it takes off, Keighley will get a nice pay day.

The app offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Portal 2, which has been in the works since 2007. Keighley spent more than three years talking to the team. The app takes advantage of the iPad’s large high-resolution display and “pushes video game journalism in a bold new direction, blending interactivity, storytelling and multimedia” to take readers inside Valve, Keighley says. It has in-depth interviews with Valve founder Gabe Newell and the team behind the game. The app has photos, audio clips, 360-degree panoramas, videos, polls and other interactive material.

I used to read Keighley’s “Final Hours” pieces for GameSpot in the 1990s. He used to write 10,000-word stories about how blockbuster games were made. He got away from those magazine-length pieces after he made the move to TV. It’s nice to see him return to that. Keighley has been covering the game industry for more than 20 years. And for those of you who think he looks young, he actually started at age 13.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The new position is the latest step by the social media giant to improve the quality of professional news on its website by advocating the use of Facebook as a reporting and promotional tool for journalists.

Lavrusik will manage the new Facebook Journalists page created last week as well as organize journalism-focused events like the one scheduled at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters April 27.

The motivation for Facebook to improve their relationships with the media could be in part to the company wanting to steal some steam away from microblogging site Twitter, which arguably is a more popular reporting tool for journalists.

“The goal is to build programs that bridge the gap between journalists and Facebook,” Lavrusik told CNN. “Twitter is very public. It’s an informational platform. It’s easy to see the application for news.”

However, there are plenty of other reasons they would want to get more involved with journalists and reporting.

News organizations that directly worked with Facebook experienced a 300 percent increase in referral traffic to their websites, the company points out.

If Facebook became an essential tool for reporting professional news, those numbers would be more sustainable and add stability to Facebook’s high valuation.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the debate is how AOL and Huffington Post executives are describing the thinking behind the deal. The HuffPo, as it’s known, has its roots as a popular, controversial, and left-leaning political blog. But in AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong’s lengthy memo to employees, the word “politics” only comes up twice, and both times in the context of a longer list of coverage areas.

Instead of describing Huffington (who is taking control of AOL’s entire editorial output) as a political pundit, Armstrong said that she’s “a world-renowned topic expert on women’s topics and issues” and that the her site includes “a great focus on women’s content.” This seems to fit with one of Armstrong’s main emphases in The New Yorker’s profile of AOL (subscription required) from earlier this month. New Yorker reporter Ken Auletta wrote:

[Armstrong] also decided to direct more of the company’s focus toward women, whose interests and needs, he believes, are not well served by the rest of the Web. When AOL started redesigning its blogs, it began with the women’s sites, like StyleList.com, AOL Shopping, and KitchenDaily.com. Nearly sixty per cent of all visitors to [AOL’s local news network] Patch are women. On the company page describing its demographics for the sake of advertisers, the first two categories mentioned are “women” and “moms.”

That all sounds great, but critics point out that the two companies are linked less by a focus on women and more by their reputation for less-than-top-notch content. (Perhaps the most amusing criticism of AOL’s content came from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who is an AOL employee himself — he described AOL-owned Engadget as a “plasticized caricature of a real blog.”) Writing at The Daily Beast, the site run by Huffington’s nemesis Tina Brown, Dan Lyons lays out the case that the journalism in the combined company will be mediocre and the advertising prices will remain low.

Personally, I’m not sure if AOL can really turn itself around. But if Huffington can’t save the company, who can? Auletta’s largely skeptical article (his conclusion: “AOL does not seem to be saving journalism, and journalism does not yet seem to be saving AOL”) suggests that AOL needs someone at the top with a strong editorial vision. Whether or not you like the HuffPo, Huffington has built a site with a real brand, a massive audience, and a profitable business model.

The site, eByline.com, serves as a marketplace for freelance journalists and reporters to showcase their work and offer it up for syndication. Reporters can set whatever price they want for their work. Publishers can then pick and choose from individual stories and pay the reporter directly without having to set up any kind of subscription. eByline then takes an 8 percent cut of the transaction.

Not everyone can jump on the service as a freelance journalist, though. eByline requires that potential freelancers have samples of paid freelance reporting work from within the year prior to joining the service — commentary writing, which is what many leisure bloggers do, doesn’t count. Freelancers have to provide clips as well as have some educational background, although the site doesn’t specify what level of education is required. Reporters also need referrals from an editor or news organization and must be U.S. citizens (“due to tax reporting and payment processing”), although it looks like the service might be working to expand beyond that last restriction in the future.

Publishers can also sign up to distribute their content and can set their stories to be distributed under embargo if they choose. On this front, eByline is taking a crack at the major wire services, which provide a lot of content to daily newspapers and other news publications across the world. The major services — like Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones — all provide content as part of a subscription. eByline hopes to buck that trend by providing content á la carte.

The Los Angeles, Calif.-based company was founded in 2009, but the service officially launched last month. Its partnered content publishers include ProPublica, business entertainment news magazine Variety, and some independent news publications like The Texas Observer. It has four employees.

AOL has gotten a lot of ink

Few have heard of Clarity Digital Group, the owner of Examiner.com and a property of Denver-based The Anschutz Company. But that may change as news of its success spreads. Started in the spring of 2008, Examiner.com now has 19 million unique visitors a month and 54 million page views a month for its local news and reviews.

“There is a lot of talk about AOL and how they are doing cover local communities with Patch,” said Leonard Brody, president of Clarity Digital. “We feel like we are already there.”

While there are some professional news journalists producing material, most of its is produced by 55,000 amateur writers who know the local neighborhoods that they’re writing about. It’s applying the concept of crowdsourcing, tapping the wisdom of the masses, to journalism — though in Examiner.com’s case, the amateur writers are all paid based on ad revenues and measures of engagement with their stories.

The rush is on to claim the turf of hyperlocal news and advertising, where billions of dollars are at stake. Newspapers are dying, yet no one has come to replace them in local online markets. Examiner.com deliberately avoids the role of being an online newspaper, whose role is more like being the watchdog of a community. Rather, Brody sees his company’s role more as reinventing the town square.

“We want to connect those who are passionate about their own community,” he said in an interview.

While national and global audiences have been aggregated by the likes of CNN, Yahoo, and Google, nobody really dominates hyper local, which is the opposite of a mass market and which is defined by its neighborhood focus where the content is created by locals and consumed by locals. As mentioned, billions of dollars are spent in hyperlocal venues, but big corporate advertisers find that the customers hard to reach. That’s because it’s like trying to become a millionaire by picking up all the pennies in a field.

One big difference is that newspapers hire journalists while Examiner.com hires examiners. Examiners are local experts, usually not journalists, who are passionate about subjects such as pets. They are not the conscience of the community, but a reflection of it, Brody said. They could post about local dog parks or write restaurant reviews. They are paid based on a complex formula that includes how many page views they get, how many views come from local readers, and how much users are engaged with their posts, said Rick Blair, chief executive of Clarity Digital. Most of the examiners do not make a living on their posts, but view the work as an avocation. For instance, a former New York Times writer is an examiner focused on cycling in New York City.

“We give the examiners a platform for their passion and they find that very rewarding,” Blair said. “The more exposure and recognition they get, the hapier they are.”

It seems to be working. The company started with just six markets covered by 100 examiners. Clarity Digital got funding from telecom billionaire Phil Anschutz, who owns the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Examiner. (Aside from having an investor in common, Examiner.com is not related to those news properties, which operate on their own domain names.)

With Anschutz’s backing, it was able to patiently add new markets. Now the company serves 238 markets in the U.S. and Canada. Some 150 cities were added this year.

In Los Angeles alone, the company has 2,000 “examiners,” its name for its local writers. That’s larger than the journalist staff of the Los Angeles Times. During the recent Los Angeles fires, one examiner who had firefighting skills was blogging and fighting the fire at the same time.

About 35 percent to 45 percent of the network’s examiners are active in a given month. On average, they write six or seven articles a month. Over time, that has added up. Examiners produce 3,500 articles a day, and the archive of articles is 1.5 million on everything from where to find parking in Chicago to good places to eat in Los Angeles. Blair said the company’s core competency is recruiting good examiners and grooming them.

While these writers aren’t doing investigative journalism, they aren’t paid shills either, Blair said. He actually approached major advertisers to see if they wanted to pay writers to produce articles about their goods and they said they wanted genuine work. Advertisers may sponsor campaigns such as a major series on pets, but the work is not paid advertorial. Advertisers can sponsor an examiner if they want a certain kind of topic covered. The ideal examiner post will produce water cooler talk, not straight hard news.

While the pay isn’t huge (and Examiner.com officials wouldn’t provide details), Examiner.com is now getting 10,000 applications a month fo examiners. It vets each application and accepts about 40 percent of them, after looking at sample stories and writing skills (and doing criminal background checks). The writers can focus on any of 200 categories or subcategories. the writers can look at a dashboard and see how much money they have made in a month.

Examiner.com is making money through local ads, examiner sponsorships, and campaigns that are targeted via Examiner Connect, which combines content creation with social media and search engine optimization techniques. The company did a campaign with pet food maker Iams related to pet adoption. That resulted in much better search results for searchers on the words “pet adoption” and “Iams.” On such campaigns, the competition isn’t as fierce.

Even as it adds examiners, the costs expand only as more revenue comes in, Blair said.

Examiner.com has about 100 employees on staff.

You can read up on Jennifer Preston’s background  in this morning’s entertainingly cruel Gawker post. More important is that the New York Times as an organization takes social networks seriously as a work tool. A leaked internal email describes Preston’s role:

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

@NYT_JenPreston has already taken early feedback: She unprotected her Twitter updates this morning and is now trolling for input on her job. I’m sure 80 percent of that feedback will consist of “you’re an idiot” and “The New York Times will be dead in ____ days/months/years.” Hang in there, Jen. They did this to David Pogue, too.