Wednesday squibs

Okay, I’m jumping the gun a little. But I’ll be flying out for a quick visit to Boulder, Colorado tomorrow and I may not get a chance to do much blogging, either tomorrow morning or any time over the next four or five days.

• The real competition for local media. Terry Heaton issues a warning to local newspapers that their local markets are in play. The latest challenge is from Yahoo. Says Terry: “his is the most serious threat to local media. The more we obsess over our precious content, the easier it is for outsiders to come in a steal our revenue base (while we sit by and do nothing).”
• Value of McClatchy’s Seattle Times Co. investment plummets. Jim Romenesko passes on a Crosscut report on the falling value of another daily newspaper, this time about 12 per cent in six months.
• Animoto. Another web-based service that puts together images and music, but with a twist: the music-video-style piece gets mixed for you. Not much storytelling value that I can see, but it looks like it’ll be fun to play with. Via Multimedia Evangelist.
• 5 steps for teams producing journalism. Mindy McAdams passes along five essential steps for teams who are committing journalism. Someone should give Mindy an award for the amount of knowledge she freely shares with the rest of us.
• Copy this idea: party videos by Melena Ryzik. Angela Grant points to a New York Times video feature that shows the potential for building audience with video “columnists.”
• Canada lacks the courage of Somali journalists. A passionate piece in the Globe & Mail, by Ross Howard, who helped train one of the two journalists slain in Somalia last week. His piece is a call for Canadian journalists — and those who believe in journalism — to become much more involved in their craft.
• New Media and Journalism. I can’t comment much on this interview with an interview with Kara Andrade, “a promising young journalist who just graduated from U.C. Berkeley’s School of Journalism,” — other than it looks interesting — but I’ll be listening to it on the flight tomorrow.
• dhpi (visual stories). Daniel Pi, the storyteller, is a former student, who has started photo-blogging his treks into our province’s great outdoors. You might enjoy these small stories and, especially, the photos.